Christmas flights in doubt: Virgin staff vote to strike as Qantas on a wing and a prayer

Australian air travellers are staring down the barrel of another grim holiday period, with Virgin Australia’s 1,000-strong cabin crew voting for industrial action that could see 24-hour strikes. It’s the latest in growing airline union restlessness that began in Qantas regional carriers, and unions have signalled there may be more ahead.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. A fresh wave of COVID is continuing to gather pace, forcing sick days and hitting aircraft crews with delays and cancellations, industry insiders said. Qantas’ lack of aircraft is hitting airline schedules hard too, with no improvements for its under-the-pump maintenance division despite management changes.

Cancellations across the sector last month were running at about twice the pre-COVID rate, with the Qantas Group at 3.8% and Virgin at 4.1% of all flights cancelled, compared with average pre-COVID figures of roughly 2%. Yesterday the percentage of flights delayed in Australia were Virgin 28% and Qantas 26%, according to international aircraft-tracking site FlightAware.

“Virgin cabin crew are concerned the airline has held out on key job security provisions to protect cabin crew employees against work being outsourced to casuals or contractors, while fatiguing rosters remain unaddressed,” the Transport Workers’ Union (TWU) said.

The ballot had a 90% participation rate — 99% voted yes to 24-hour stoppages, and the average across all possible actions including shorter stoppages and overtime bans was 98% in favour.

The TWU said Virgin had refused to provide the full results of a staff morale survey to cabin crew, but had admitted satisfaction with working conditions and pay received one of the lowest scores. It also admitted work satisfaction was seen to improve with work-life balance improvements to rosters and leave processes. The Australian Federation of Air Pilots (AFAP) has begun bargaining with Virgin for pilots whose enterprise agreement is due June 30, 2024 — the same time as Qantas short-haul pilots’ enterprise agreement, for which negotiations are expected to begin this month, union sources said.

”Recent mainline EA negotiations, and the SH [short-haul] variation, contained significant pilot concessions resulting in permanent material losses for the pilot body. It is the QPC’s [Qantas Pilot’s Committee] position that previous negotiations limited to the approach of interest-based bargaining have resulted in unfair outcomes for the pilots, delivering results overwhelmingly in the company’s favour,” a note to members from the AFAP said.

Qantas is also trying to patch its tattered relationship with pilots at Perth’s Network Aviation, which saw in October the first strike by flight deck crew at the airline for more than 40 years. Many pilots at Network Aviation are paid barely half their colleagues’ level at Qantas mainline for flying similar-sized, single-aisle passenger jets. Qantas management has been forced to come back with an enterprise agreement that has offered better pay.

“Should the proposed agreement be voted up, the base salary percentage increase for Network pilots is between 12% to 22%,” the AFAP said.

Still, Network Aviation pilots who spoke to Crikey said many of the group remained unhappy and the loss of Australian pilots to the US is likely to continue. There, far higher salaries and better conditions are offered in a sector that has an advantage over most international pilots due to the Australia-US free trade agreement.

But Qantas’ biggest problem remains its dire lack of aircraft, its ageing fleet and lack of spare parts. It has introduced the first of two Finnair planes staffed with Finnair crew — a deal over which cabin staff say they were misled — offering a Qantas service between Sydney and Singapore and introducing another to Bangkok next month. The main delivery of A220 aircraft, to replace what insiders say is its chronically breaking-down B717 fleet, has been delayed — and the holiday season means aircraft work longer and harder.

In its maintenance division, little has changed since the company replaced Alan Joyce with Vanessa Hudson as CEO.

“Higher aircraft utilisation means that there are no spare aircraft, and more and more aircraft having work that must be done,” a Qantas engineer told Crikey. “You can only defer things that need to be repaired for so long before it must be done, and then when you try to achieve this work in a short ground-time, delays are inevitable. Overtime is offered every day but it seems people are getting over doing it.”

That appears to remain one of the biggest problems at Qantas: that not much has changed under Hudson. Qantas was pilloried for painting three aircraft in First Nations livery as part of its support for the Voice to Parliament at a time when customers were screaming for fewer cancellations and delays and better service.

Now Qantas management has displayed yet another example of having a tin ear, focusing resources on painting two “Christmas” planes with (decidedly unAustralian) reindeer. The aircraft are QantasLink’s Q400 “Dasher-8” and B737 “Roo-dolph”, and customers “lucky” enough to fly them receive double frequent flyer points.

Customers already under broader cost-of-living pressures are tipping windfall profits into Qantas’ pocket, with oil falling from US$85 a barrel — at a time when the airline raised fares by 3.5% mid-October to cover “rising prices” — to US$75 yesterday. That’s a 3.5% rise compared with a 13% fall.

In an interview in December last year, Joyce finally confessed after a horror year of criticism that: “A lot of the criticism we copped was fair enough because the travel experience wasn’t nearly as smooth as people are used to from the industry as a whole.”

A year down the track that, unfortunately, continues to be the case for too many customers.