Variation to the NJS Enterprise Agreement – Qantas Rejects Council Proposal
You may recall that for some months now your AFAP Pilot Council has been stressing on the Company to address the clearly inadequate Pilot Enterprise Agreement. The matter was made more pressing once clear indicators emanated from management that they were wanting to address the issue and that positive developments were imminent.
Needless to say nothing materialised, with the net result of greater frustration being felt from the NJS pilot community.
Your Pilot Council then used the intervening period to convince the company that just leaving this issue unresolved not only frustrated the pilot group but was also a clear indicator that pilots within NJS were not valued. In addition the massive pilot recruitment scheduled to commence from mid-2025 was going to hit some significant hurdles if the company failed to address the current EA.
Our current EA is just not competitive in the current pilot market and ultimately new pilots will not only not come to NJS, the current pilot group will also be keen to move on with their new 220 rating. This was also firmly backed up by the pilot surveys we conducted earlier in the year.
Despite these efforts your Council had been unable to convince NJS to be proactive in addressing an EA that clearly wasn’t fit for purpose. As a result we felt we had no option but to formally write to the company requesting that the current EA be varied with changes to the salary rates and some other key rostering provisions. The correspondence to the company sent in mid-July can be
reviewed here.
Needless to say no response was forthcoming. Not wanting this matter to drop we again wrote to the company on 26th September, asking for a response by Friday 4th October, some 10 weeks after our formal request. We also made it clear that no response by that date would be viewed by the Council as a rejection of our proposal.
You will not be shocked to hear that their reply has been to reject the AFAP proposals on the basis that bargaining for the next EA can commence in September or October 2025.
The clear message is that whilst currently flying demands are so low within NJS and that pilot numbers remain stable, the company believe they can ride this one out and hope for a changed pilot market next year. The short-term perspective of this approach is verging on mis-management and clearly Qantas do not learn from their mistakes.
Take the Qantas Shorthaul variation pushed through at the tail end of the pandemic – an opportunistic variation that in no doubt contributed to the recent rejection of the proposed shorthaul EA. The NJS EA that was forced through at the same time under the threat of the 220’s going elsewhere will have the same effect – it will either force pilots to ply their trade where they will be more valued elsewhere – or it will heighten the anger of pilots in the run up to the next EA negotiations. Either way the failure to address a known problem is pure short-termism from Qantas.
This position from the company is clearly both disappointing and a disregard to the views of the pilot group that your Council has forthrightly expressed to the company over the past year. It is more important now than ever to start preparing for the next round of negotiations in some 12 months time, which means maximising pilot membership of the AFAP and preparing for what will be a difficult set of negotiations!!
As always we remain available for your feedback and thoughts:
Anthony Clouting on
clouters@me.com
Eric Galliers on
ericgalliers@hotmail.com
Justin Gordon on
justin.gordon69@gmail.com
Paul Davison on
paul_davison85@hotmail.com
In addition, AFAP staff member Chris Aikens can be contacted on
chris@afap.org.au. The AFAP also has their Member Assistance Program (MAP) which can be accessed via Freecall 1300 307 912.