In the aftermath of industrial action by Qantas workers at airports in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth on March 30 over plans out-source jobs, Qantas announced on April 14 that 1750 jobs would be cut.
Qantas also plans to ground 10 of its aircraft and will likely sell them.
The company has adjusted its forecasted before-tax profit for the full year from around $500 million to somewhere between $100 million to $200 million.
Qantas is blaming the economic downturn and deterioration in trading conditions. The company has called for workers and unions to react "sensibly" to the news.
CEO Alan Joyce told the ABC's 7:30 Report he hoped "that all the unions and all of the employees realise that in this competitive environment, the last thing we want to see is industrial action that will only damage more jobs and will only damage Qantas into the future".
Joyce added: "We believe that the action we're taking is what's needed to protect the 34,000 jobs in the company … We will be talking to the employees, to the unions about the imperative nature of what we have to do in order to protect the business and we think that people will listen to that. And I expect people to act sensibly and I think they will."
Despite giving lip service to the protection of jobs, what Joyce is really talking about here is the protection of profits for Qantas and its shareholders and the huge remuneration of executives.
He expects workers to pay for the mistakes and irrationality of the companies they work for and the capitalist system.
The argument that workers and bosses are somehow "in the same boat" and share the same interests is trotted out whenever workers are called on to make sacrifices to keep companies' profits up.
The Australian Council of Trade Unions has made lukewarm calls on Qantas to minimise the damage done. ACTU secretary Jeff Lawrence said in an April 14 statement: "We hope that the airline understands the importance of minimising job losses and is prepared to take all steps to ensure workers are redeployed and are offered retraining and a reduction in hours rather than compulsory redundancies."
The real response unions should have to this announcement is to call for profits to take a hit rather than jobs or wages. The bosses have reaped the benefits in the good times and seen their share of the pie increase. They should be the ones that pay for the crisis their greed has caused — not the workers who created their profits.
We need to decisively reject the "reasoning" that capitalists suggest and engage in militant industrial action in defence of workers' rights. Workers need, and deserve, more than a purely defensive campaign of minimising job losses.
In fact, in this time of economic downturn we need to put forward the argument that Qantas should be re-nationalised (and other companies laying off workers or facing bankruptcy should be nationalised, also). It could be run in the interests of those that work for it, society as a whole and the environment (nationalisation offers more social control over polluting industries such as airlines).