Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [39]
In fact, it would not be until two decades later that Australia’s pilots would be finally put in their place by a politician who called them glorified bus drivers. Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s attack on pilots at the outset of the domestic pilots’ pay dispute in 1989 finally showed pilots what politicians and the business community thought of them. The dispute would have far-reaching consequences for Qantas and its future, ultimately helping to push it towards privatisation.
Australia’s domestic airline pilots, employed by Ansett, East West Airlines, Ipec Aviation and the government-owned Australian Airlines (previously TAA) demanded a pay rise of 29.47 per cent. When it was rejected, all 1,647 domestic airline pilots resigned, prompting what Qantas historian John Gunn described as ‘the worst crisis ever faced by the aviation industry’.16
In solidarity with their colleagues, all Qantas pilots refused to carry domestic passengers. But the government was resolute. The Royal Australian Air Force was drafted in to carry domestic passengers to Australia’s capital cities using aircraft including Hercules transports and a Boeing 707. The RAAF had to refuel at military bases because Transport Workers’ Union members refused to touch them. Fourteen overseas airlines with domestic legs in Australia also agreed to carry domestic passengers, but even so passenger numbers were down by more than 75 per cent.
The Labor government remained firm, with Prime Minister Hawke staking his own survival on beating the pilots. Using highly charged rhetoric he warned that the pilots’ action threatened ‘Australian life as we know it’. Should the pilots win, he said, ‘The whole wage system is dead and Australia is dead’.17 What quickly became clear was that the pilots’ decision to resign had left them badly exposed. Transport Minister Ralph Willis said: ‘They have resigned on absurd advice from their union. The organisation has virtually committed suicide. It is now a matter between individual pilots and their companies.’18 He was right, the pilots had lost their collective power.
James Strong, the chief executive of Australian Airlines, became the effective mouthpiece of all the airlines and offered the pilots individual contracts based on productivity – more pay for more flying. Strong refused to negotiate with the Pilots’ Federation. He had been hired three and a half years previously to turn the nationalised domestic airline that was TAA into the more competitive Australian Airlines. His brutal economics had been a culture shock to the loyal staff of TAA, who prided themselves on providing the nation with a safe and reliable domestic airline.
Strong, who left Australian Airlines during the pilots’ dispute, had no words of sympathy for the pilots. ‘I get pilots ringing me or writing saying “How could you do this to us? What a terrible thing for all the loyalty we have given the airline”,’ he told the Melbourne Age. ‘Not one of them ever stops to think that the airline has given them a wonderful career, the best training in the world, made them the pilots they are, given them good salaries, wonderful superannuation schemes – and they have put the airline on the ground, costing it millions and millions of dollars.’19 Qantas pilots, crew and staff would do well to heed those words and sentiments – James Strong was the man who would later be appointed to step in and ramrod Qantas into the cut-throat private sector.
If the pilots thought they could salvage a victory from the dispute they were sadly mistaken. After a month Hawke declared a state of national emergency and backed the airlines by waiving any fees, such as airport landing fees, that they owed the government. Australian Airlines started to put on a service using management crew and Ansett announced it had hired back 50 of its pilots on individual contracts. The airlines then began to advertise for pilots overseas and took out newspaper advertisements to warn Australian pilots that there were only jobs for six out of every ten pilots who chose to come back on individual contracts.