Qantas may cancel more flights

An AAP and Sydney Morning Herald report says that  Qantas may have to cancel more flights because of work bans by aircraft engineers.

Rolling stoppages are affecting Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, as aircraft engineers continue their push for a 5% pay rise.

Qantas shares fell 1.3% to $2.99 in midday trading, their lowest level in two years.

Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association president Paul Cousins today apologised for the disruptions, saying the union had been forced into taking action.

“I’d like to apologise to the Australian flying public,” he told ABC Online. “We have been forced into this position by Qantas who seems to wish to dictate an outdated wages policy upon its employees.”

But Qantas chief executive Geoff Dixon called the union apology a “joke”.”

I think the fact that they are apologising to passengers is a little bit of a joke,” Mr Dixon told ABC Radio. “They’re the ones putting on this industrial disputation, not us.”

Mr Dixon said the airline was not prepared to move on its 3% pay offer and would bring in outside engineers if the industrial action continued.

He said one of the company’s contingency plans if the dispute continued was to bring in fully-licensed principally Australian engineers to do the work.

He said between 20 and 30 flights out of the 350 Qantas flights that took off every day may be cancelled if the work bans continued.

“We’re not going to lock people out we’re not going to try and change our workforce that is not on,” he said.

“This will be resolved one way or the other but I think it’s very, very important that it’s resolved so Qantas has a secure future.”

Mr Dixon said the airline’s wages policy had delivered most workers an increase of 3% a year for the past seven or eight years, with bonuses of between 3 and 4% on top of that.

He said unlike other airlines throughout the world, Qantas had managed to grow its business, adding 8000 jobs.

“We’re not prepared to contemplate 5%,” he said.

“We will have a record profit this year but we’ll also have in the year coming up in about two weeks time $2 billion more in our fuel bill than the current year.

“Everybody, apparently except the engineers, realise that fuel is almost out of control, that all airlines around the world are making major changes to their business and we have to do the same.”

Mr Dixon said the impact of soaring global crude oil prices would be bigger than other challenges the airline had had to face, including the three-month outbreak of SARS and the September 11 attacks on New York.

“Fuel will never go back down to the levels that we’ve known say two years ago,” he said. “I’m hoping it will go down to a level where we can still continue to do quite well as an airline, but to do that we’ll still have to restructure.

“So it’s the biggest change the industry has faced, I think, in probably in 30 or 40 years.”

Mr Dixon said discussion about his personal pay packet in the current economic climate was legitimate and the airline had announced a freeze on all executive salaries six weeks ago.

“All I can say is that it’s a board decision,” he said. “I run a company of 36,000 people, $15 billion in revenue and it’s a 24-hour-a-day job.”

A report from AAP, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Mole