EA Update No.9 – July
As you would remember prior to our meeting with the company yesterday your negotiating team had requested the company to reply to our proposed salary scales sent to them since our previous EA meeting.
While the company did not get back to us prior to yesterday’s meeting, the meeting commenced with the disappointing but not unexpected news of the company advising our team that our proposal was not acceptable and promptly moved to saying that only their original proposal was within the scope for any approval.
The company talked through their whole proposal again in more detail. It did include some minor tweaks from the original proposal but nothing substantial enough to change our view that it was a financially lean 4-year proposal without nearly enough in it to be even close to being acceptable.
Your negotiating team were disappointed that even though it had originally taken over 8 weeks for the company to come up with a substandard offer that their position hadn’t changed. It consisted of basically the standard 3% QF annual salary increases with an additional 3% buffer applied at the bottom FO levels to insulate the pay rates from falling below the minimum award rate during the course of the agreement. It included a jump for FO’s going onto the fourth year pay scale once they achieved 2000 hours and the frozen ATPL requirements and 2 more years of service at the top of the pay scales. It also included an increase from 8.6 days off (current roster average) to a guaranteed 9 days off per roster. For this additional proposed 0.4 of a day off per month it was made clear that funding would be required from some EA allowance strip outs.
The company then stepped us through the demographics of who would benefit from some of the pay increases during the life of the agreement. This was basically framed to try to demonstrate to us that their proposals covered a substantial number of the pilot population getting a decent pay rise in the life of the agreement and that they believed it was a good deal and would get voted up. It would fair to say that your negotiating group could not believe our ears.
After a composure break, we addressed the substantial issues and shortfalls of the company proposal and that it was basically the same lean and unacceptable proposal as before. Your negotiating team then confirmed that our counter proposal still stood, and we would consider accepting a couple of the company log of claim items on the proviso that our counter proposal was taken onboard as a package.
Our proposal consisted of the salary scale proposal already sent to the company with the addition of a few main ticket items in our log of claim. These included guaranteed additional days off, expansion of DHA calculated for whole time away from home base, frozen ATPL hour pay rate trigger being 1500 hrs instead of 2000 hrs and staff travel parity for years of service with QF shorthaul and QF longhaul pilots. We are all QF group pilots.
In closing we gave the company until the end of next week to get back to us regarding our proposal, or we will be arranging pilot meetings immediately to discuss our options going forward.
Essentially the company terminated the meeting at this point and walked out.
We cannot and will not allow these negotiations to get protracted. It is in both parties interests to ensure further delays do not happen as we need to stem the attrition of our pilots moving onto other carriers. The company has to recognise that the Sunstate salary scales are just not competitive when you take into account the lean rollover deal which included the 2 year pay freeze, the loss of compounding 3 x 3% pay rates (as compared to QF shorthaul & longhaul EA pre covid deals), over 15 % National Wage Case increases over the past 3 years, the blowout of HECS debt, ongoing high inflation and record interest rates.
When you couple this with pending record QF group profits and the massive contribution of the Qlink pilots during the covid years surviving on lean Jobkeeper pay and the massive efficiency and profits generated by the QF regional turboprop operation, the company has to reward us with pay and conditions more reflective of QF group pilots. Qantas has to recognise that the embarrassment of knowing that Sunstate pilots are having to get second jobs to make ends meet, has to end. No pilot in the Qantas group should be faced with such a predicament.
We will keep you posted on any updates and we will be putting out additional comms for zoom pilot meetings if required across the network in the coming couple of weeks.
This will be a tough negotiation but if we all stick together we believe that our realistic package can be achieved and eventually provide QF turboprop pilots decent professional pilot salary and conditions.
Jarrod Blaker at
jbblaker@bigpond.com
Rod Millroy at
rmillroy@gmail.com
Richard Copland at
daforce@internode.on.net
Dan Lyons at
danlyons297@hotmail.com
In addition you contact AFAP staff member Chris Aikens on
chris@afap.org.au. The AFAP Member Assistance Program (MAP) can also be contacted via Freecall 1300 307 912