The grounding, preceded by months of tension between the airline and its workers, led to the immediate cancellation of hundreds of flights, the airline said, forcing Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s beleaguered government to try to end the standoff. An emergency meeting of the national workplace relations tribunal worked through the night before adjourning on Sunday morning without a resolution. The panel said it would resume discussions later in the day.
Passengers were being rebooked on other airlines at the airline’s expense, Qantas said. But that was little comfort to stranded travelers, many of whom focused their anger at the airline and its chief executive, Alan Joyce.
“I’m definitely never flying Qantas again,” one passenger, Samantha Palmer, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
A series of labor disputes has hit the airline, the world’s 10th largest, as employees have voiced concern about jobs being moved out of Australia. Qantas has been forced to reduce and reschedule flights for weeks because of the actions, which have included strikes and refusal to work overtime.
Mr. Joyce said the airline’s fleet of 108 aircraft in up to 22 countries would remain grounded until Qantas reached an agreement over pay and work conditions with the unions representing pilots, mechanics and ground staff. Qantas employs about 35,000 people.
A spokesman for the Australian Workers’ Union, one of the country’s oldest and largest unions, with more than 135,000 members, criticized the airline’s decision to ground its fleet without notice. “Words can’t express our anger at the unilateral decision Qantas management has taken — as well as the impact it will have on all Qantas workers and the thousands of travelers now left stranded in Australia and around the world,” the national secretary of the group, Paul Howes, said.
“Unions rightly give 72 hours’ notice before industrial action, but Qantas management has given no notice before this wildcat grounding of their fleet,” he said in a statement on the union Web site.
The airline said that beginning Monday it would lock out all employees involved in the dispute, including pilots and engineers, among others. The grounding of the fleet will cost the airline an estimated $21 million a day. Qantas said it had already been losing $16 million a week in revenue as a result of the job actions.
Barry Jackson of the Australian and International Pilots Association told Sky News that Qantas had “hijacked the nation.” Mr. Jackson added, “It’s forcing the government’s hand on this.”
The Australian Foreign Ministry was adding emergency staff in Canberra, the capital, to help Australians who were stranded.
The leader of Australia’s political opposition, Tony Abbott, suggested that Ms. Gillard’s Labor government was too close to the unions involved and was putting the country’s prestige at risk.
“There’s going to be massive public inconvenience, there’s going to be massive disruption to business and there’s going to be a very big hit on Australia’s international reputation because Qantas really is around the world, to a considerable extent, the face and the symbol of Australia,” he said in televised remarks.
Qantas has several flights a day from Sydney to Kennedy Airport in New York, and to Los Angeles, Dallas-Fort Worth and Honolulu.
Near-empty airports and angry customers became a staple of Australian television on Saturday night, as travelers took to social networking sites like Twitter to vent their frustration.
“Plane door was closed then they announced we were not going,” Christine Walker, a Qantas passenger in Los Angeles, wrote on Twitter in response to a question about her flight.
Matt Siegel reported from Sydney, and Kevin Drew from Hong Kong.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/business/global/qantas-grounds-its-worldwide-fleet-over-labor-dispute.html?partner=rss&emc=rss