Graham Matthews, Sydney
On March 23, Qantas closed its heavy maintenance facility at Mascot, making 480 workers redundant. While the company has promised that it will not outsource maintenance to China, the 140 extra jobs promised for Melbourne and Brisbane facilities will be contracted to employment company Falstaff, which has lower technical standards and offers lower pay and conditions than Qantas. John (not his real name), one of the remaining Qantas workers at Mascot, spoke to Green Left Weekly about the consequences for the workers and for airline safety.
Many of the workers who were sacked had been at Qantas for 20-30 years. "They've put their heart and soul into it", John said, "and most of them are right in their prime, in their 30s or 40s".
"They won't get re-employed within Qantas. They could go to Melbourne and be employed by Falstaff, but it would be at very low rates. They would have to sell-up in Sydney and move all the way down, and not many people would entertain that [idea]."
The closure of Mascot's heavy maintenance facility comes as no surprise to John. "In 1997 there was an enterprise agreement in which the company got a concession to be able to do surplus work down at Avalon. That was the thin end of the wedge and now everything is going there."
Apart from the loss of jobs, John is also concerned that the transfer of maintenance to Avalon, where staffing is outsourced to Falstaff, will endanger safety. "They are going to be staffing the maintenance facility [in Melbourne] from here, there and everywhere. You'll be getting a lot of people from outside the trade, like car mechanics, plumbers, painters or people who work in a technical area. They'll have them work on the aircraft.
"Qantas has had a very high maintenance standard because they've always trained their own people in-house and everyone is trained to a certain standard. That will go.
"We won't see apprenticeships carried out because Falstaff will be picking people from wherever they can get them at the cheapest rate. Inevitably, safety standards will go down."
The 480 sackings were just the latest step in a Qantas campaign to shut down its in-house maintenance, John said. "They're not spending any money on capital; everything's on a shoestring.
"We were doing two engine types four years ago, then two years ago they outsourced the General Electric CF-6 — that was half of our work — down to Melbourne. That was the newer engine. The Rolls Royce engine that we are left with is an older engine and I have a feeling that once they get the facility in Melbourne up and running, they'll say, 'Well, let's take the Rolls Royce down there too'."
On the future of the remaining 200 maintenance workers at Mascot, John said: "For the last few years, the workers on the floor have really felt like stunned mullets because we've had three lots of redundancy packages. It is part of the process of downsizing, outsourcing and not investing in any infrastructure." John believes that the failure of the union to fight outsourcing from the very beginning has left the workers' ability to stop more sackings and outsourcing severely weakened.
From Green Left Weekly, April 5, 2006.
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