More than a thousand Qantas engineers, fed up with management’s refusal to negotiate reasonable wages, are set to escalate the impact of their ongoing industrial action with line maintenance engineers – whose duties include the towing and marshalling of aircraft – to walk off the job during peak-hour flights on Monday morning.
Flights between 7am AEST/ 7am ACST/ 7am AWST to 9am AEST/ 9am ACST/ 9am AWST on Monday morning at major airports in Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth will be affected as workers participate in stoppages.
Qantas engineers commenced industrial action on Thursday, with engines and components maintenance workers downing tools. Line maintenance engineers stopping work on Monday is likely to have a significant and immediate impact on flights. As well as towing and marshalling aircraft, line maintenance engineers perform turnaround checks on aircraft once they land to make sure they are safe to take off again.
The Qantas Engineers’ Alliance — a union alliance comprising the AMWU, the AWU, and the ETU — said highly-skilled engineers had no option but to take industrial action given the refusal of Qantas management to come to the bargaining table, with further actions planned in the coming weeks.
Workers have been in negotiations since April, with their enterprise agreement having expired at the end of June. The wage claim made by the Alliance is for 5 percent per year, and a 15 percent first year payment to make up for 3.5 years of wage freezes.
Steve Murphy, AMWU National Secretary:
“These workers hold special and valuable skills that take a decade to build up. They were essential workers during the pandemic, and made sacrifices so Qantas would survive. Qantas needs to pay that debt back. Respect your workers, value their skills, pay them what they’re worth.
“As our members say, there are no car parks when you’re 30,000 feet in the air, so these maintenance engineers need to get it right the first time. If Qantas values that safety, it needs to show it values its workers. This is what this dispute is all about.”
Paul Farrow, AWU National Secretary:
“I know that there wouldn’t be a single engineer relishing the idea of delaying passengers. As a former aircraft engineer myself, I know there is real pride in getting people where they need to go safely. But management has backed them into a corner.
“Qantas management has absolutely smashed morale among engineers, and now we’ve reached a real fork in the road. Engineers won’t accept seeing their wages lurch backward in real terms while executives get showered in cash.”
Michael Wright, ETU National Secretary:
“For most of Qantas’s history, Qantas engineers have been deeply respected because management has understood the vital importance of the role they play in keeping passengers safe. Under Alan Joyce that respect was torched along with a lot of Qantas’s other core values.
“Vanessa Hudson needs to decide whether retaining highly skilled and experienced engineers is a priority for Qantas, or whether it’s more interested in executive bonuses. If Qantas continues to offshore maintenance because they can’t retain enough quality engineers in Australia, the safety implications are obvious.”
