The ASU AaE national negotiating team (NNT) have now had 2 meetings with Qantas management about the replacement of our current enterprise agreement (EBA). Our meetings were held on 20th October and 12th November 2014.
Our claim for this EBA was endorsed by members and it has been served on the company. We have not had any detailed presentation from the company about their claims save to say they want an 18 months wage freeze which is part of the Qantas wages policy. We await their log of claims
SCIP – what does it mean?
A significant part of our discussions has been about the impact of the SCIP program and what it will mean for work practices and how the company believes it can release a number of staff on redundancy. We are also trying to ascertain when the release will occur.
The information is sketchy at best particularly as the implementation of SCIP2 has been patchy and fraught with problems.
The company is not saying when those accepted for redundancy will leave – we will continue to press them for full transparency on the restructure as we are not convinced it is working.
Staff travel rebuff
Qantas continues to say that staff travel is not an EBA issue. As a result we wrote to them back in June 2014 to try and ascertain whey AaE staff have not been granted staff travel.
We asked who had made the decision not to grant staff travel and why the decision as made.
Here is what we received back on 14 November 2014:
"Qantas Staff Travel is a discretionary employee benefit and to date no decision is made to extend this benefit to Australian Air Express employees.
Senior Qantas management are well aware of the ASU's representations and employee interest in obtaining Qantas Staff Travel. At this stage, there is no further information available in relation to whether and when senior management may consider extending Staff Travel discretionary benefits to Australian Air Express employees.
If the position changes we will be in further contact with the ASU."
We think staff travel can be negotiated in the EBA and we will continue to press for it. It seems particularly unfair that staff of other wholly owned subsidiaries of Qantas have staff travel but AaE staff don't and we have no explanation why this is the case.
What next?
We are finalising the date for our next meeting which should be late November or early December 2014.
Stay tuned for more information.
More information
For more information, please get in touch with the relevant contact below (download the full bulletin below for details).
AaE Bulletin - 17 November 2014