What went wrong inside Australia’s biggest airline | Four Corners

[Music] i never have any hesitation myself in saying that qantas is the greatest international airline in the world there may be others that are bigger but in my humble opinion there are none quite so good for 100 years qantas has been part of the national fabric [Music] fated by prime ministers loved by the public a byword for the aussie way now it's in damage control on behalf of the national carrier i want to apologize this year the national carrier's reputation for reliability has been trashed it's not just bags being lost it's flights being cancelled i've basically told everyone i know if you can fly with virgin staff are demoralized and disillusioned it's a divide and conquer culture which the airline has put into play it makes me angry because i see our airline running down high paid qantas executives stand accused of undermining the airline through ruthless cost cutting [Music] it's not part of the spirit of australia this is a corporate dictatorship this is how the company behaves if you're not paying workers properly then how can you expect to get the kind of standard that australians have got used to from qantas in this four corners report we're bringing you the inside story about what's happening at qantas told through the voices of people who've spent years working there you'll hear their views about why qantas is failing its customers about it's at times brutal efforts to cut costs and boost the bottom line as well as their fears about what this could mean for the airline's world leading reputation for safety [Music] on the 17th of june alana gore was in a hotel packing for a qantas flight home to brisbane after a special day i graduated with my phd in alice springs when i got my phd it was like one of the most amazing days of my life because i've been working so hard all my life to get to that point in my bag i had gifts from my supervisors for finishing my phd and one of those was a beautiful basket made by the desert weavers in central australia they're one-off pieces so it can't be replaced i also had my phd certificate in there but the most absolute most important thing that was in that bag that brought me to tears was a necklace that my father made for me [Music] on arrival she went to the baggage carousel and waited and waited i thought oh you know potentially my bag is on the next flight you know maybe they just didn't get it on that one and the next flight had two of my supervisors on it as well so i sent a text to one of my supervisors and said have you landed yet have you got your bag and she replied and said ah alana i'm sorry i'm i'm at home and so i didn't realise how long i'd been waiting but she'd obviously landed got her bag and gone so my bag definitely wasn't there days turn to weeks as alana tried in vain to get help from qantas [Music] i tried contacting over and over again you couldn't get through on the phone lines or anything either they were conveniently down and i was thinking why is this happening you know this is a it's a big company it's been around for a very long time so it's an icon in australia and it's like how is this happening where's the management and at that point i was like it was sad about everything else it's going to cost me a lot of money to replace but i was like that's fine but i was like my dad's necklace that's it's irreplaceable then suddenly after weeks of inaction qantas took up her case after a four corners researcher followed her on twitter and then coincidentally like within half an hour i got a message from qantas saying send us a private message you know and we'll try and work out where your bag is and i was like yeah okay at that point you know they said that they're going to make my case a priority i don't believe i would have it back if it wasn't for them worrying about their reputation more than their customer service it's one of thousands of stories like this bags lost flights cancelled flights delayed in record numbers at a premium airline charging premium prices montes blames the problems on labour shortages and covert illness across aviation we're also saying that passengers are rusty and traveling as well i think our customers are not much fit this is nobody's fault it's not our staff's faults it's not the airport's fault it's not the airline's fault it's just dealing with the this aftermath of coming out of covert but qantas will not accept that part of the problem stems from a deliberate corporate strategy to outsource jobs and cut costs it is gut-wrenching it is gut-wrenching to see the company that we loved end up like this my name is don dixon i was a loading supervisor at qantas domestic ramp for 20 years that job entails to ensure that the planes are loaded safely with not only baggage but cargo dangerous goods and that everything's located and locked down securely in accordance to the regulations i had to sign the aircraft off if i didn't sign the aircraft off it didn't go don dixon started at qantas in different times it was extremely difficult to get into qantas because it was a career when i first went for the application there was thousands of people going for i think about 10 or 12 positions so it was very hard to get in there and you had to jump through a lot of hoops different phases of interviewing but once you got in you became part of the qantas family and it was a career after covert devastated aviation in 2020 qantas announced it would retrench 1700 ground staff at australia's major airports it outsourced the work to contractors anticipating savings of a hundred million a year insiders have told us how this strategy has backfired spectacularly from workers loading the bags to pilots flying the planes we talked to dozens of employees about what's going on and what's going wrong the difficulty that current staff face is they can be sacked for speaking out so we disguised their identities to protect them [Music] we took the additional precaution of using an actor to voice their words as a pilot operating in the domestic environment on a regular basis i can assure you that the delays passengers are facing as a result of the outsourcing of the ground handling staff we can be all ready to go on the flight deck all passengers loaded and we'll be sitting there 20 or 30 minutes waiting for someone to be available to push the aircraft back or waiting for the passengers or freight to be loaded it wouldn't 100 be because of that but definitely over 50 per cent of flights are delayed because of the ground handling anybody that thinks the outsource of the in-house ground handling is not a problem is delusional bags aren't making aircraft on time bags are being loaded onto aircraft incorrectly flights are being cancelled because crew are running out of hours to operate these flights in the time it would take to fix the issues qantas outsourced to several specialist ground handling companies including swissport which took over the work in sydney and melbourne by easter this year as passenger numbers grew it was bedlam if you go to sydney airport now they've put garbage bags up on the windows where all these bags are being held that have been lost or haven't made flights because i don't know do they not want the people to see what's going on outsourced ground handling staff were struggling we're expected to do basically the tasks that the qantas ground services did but with a lot less numbers and experience and as a result we have a very high turnover rate that makes the already bad situation even worse we can't build enough experienced people doing the job more efficiently and safely and so we do jobs more slowly and more haphazardly as people just don't know they're still learning on the job this is not how planes should be loaded the profile needs to be closer into the phone loading bags and cargo correctly is critical to safety and according to insiders qantas has been perilously close to error one instance i'm aware of the ground handlers they loaded the aircraft incorrectly so what should have gone in the front when in the back what when in the back should have gone in the front it's all things to do with weight these sorts of things there's a certain way aircrafts have to be loaded down below and it was only realised it was done the wrong way just before the cargo hold was supposed to be closed [Music] according to qantas the error being picked up by a supervisor before the aircraft left shows a safety system that's working it claims there's been a lower rate of incidents than when the work was done in-house [Music] and so as we go into the next phase as job keeper ends at the end of this month the morrison government gave a special wage subsidy to airlines after its scrapped job keeper but it excluded the ground handling companies qantas had outsourced to and workers abandoned the industry in their thousands [Applause] it left a skill shortage causing chaos when passenger numbers climbed how do you feel when you hear qantas executives say that getting rid of you and your colleagues has made not one iota of difference to service well that just shows how out of touch they are when i started my supervisor had 20 years experience already he showed me that this is what you do in this position position when a machine breaks down this is what you do when the machine doesn't work properly all these things that you don't learn from a book or in training that experience is invaluable you can't buy that now these young people coming in now haven't got that i think what's happened is we've taken an afl standard team of ground handlers and ground staff and what we've done is we've actually recruited the under-19s from the local park to to replace them tony lucas wears two hats he's the president of the australian and international pilots association which represents thousands of pilots he's also a senior qantas pilot himself i've been a pilot for about 30 years 27 of those with qantas airways and risen through the ranks of qantas i've flown the 747 400 the 767 for most of my time in qantas a very short sabbatical on the a380 so i'm a chicken training captain on the a330 today he's heading out of sydney airport on a training flight for another pilot qantas pilots are usually barred from speaking to the media but his position with the pilots association makes him an exception tell me some stories that you're hearing from your members about what's been happening on the ground oh there's lots of things occurring at the moment uh there's aircraft that are being told they're departing without any passenger baggage there's pages not loaded off flights so we've had crew that have been ready to depart all the passengers loaded for the subsequent flight and the baggage hasn't been unloaded from the previous flight and then pilots being told that they need to depart because we need to get the passengers to their destination so now we've got two sets of passengers that don't have their bags i've been ready to depart and had all the passengers on board and you you check with the engineer on the headset and ask how the cargo loading's going and and his response is what cargo loading there's no one here qantas has an enviable safety record the company is adamant that is not at risk but qantas staff have concerns all the disruptions that we're getting none of them in and of themselves are anything different to what we deal with on a day-to-day basis what we're seeing at the moment is we're seeing them occur multiple times in the day we're seeing them occur across multiple weeks and ultimately that's where things start to increase in operational complexity that any one of those things on their own isn't a big deal to deal with but when you start adding them up all together across multiple flights that starts to become a concern for safety for safety [Music] as frustrating as it is for passengers for pilots it means we're working a lot harder to keep the flights on schedule we're working longer hours we're redlining running at max capacity in a very dynamic challenging environment there's a lot that can go wrong oh i've come through and i'm going to show you some very old aircraft there's certainly a bit of aviation history in here sure is i'll uh probably first i'll take you over to the tiger ones and uh yeah i'll probably show you just a little bit of a demonstration of what can happen if you're too fatigued steve pavinas heads the licensed aircraft maintenance engineers association he spent 20 years working for qantas so i'm going to open her up go to the oil cap and take the oil cap off and i would normally pour my oil in there like that give it a wipe give it a bit of a wipe just to make sure that everything's okay and there we go what's the problem the problem is i forgot to put the oil cap back on so what that can lead to is with the oil cap loose like that the oil can come out in flight and that's the problem this happened on a jetstar flight staff numbers and fatigue distractions all of these things combined and can lead to problems on planes according to steve pavinas and some qantas engineers we spoke to that's a risk the airline is running because of deep staff cuts during the covert crisis when any given engineer goes into work today they're loaded up with more work than they would have been pre-covered about two or three months into covert qantas come out and said we want to make 20 of the engineers redundant they were oversubscribed they ultimately let go near on 35 of the engineers and we were telling them all along that you cannot do this you won't have enough people employed by the airline to maintain the aircraft when things rebound it's hard to believe that qantas which has staked its reputation on its enviable safety record would cut numbers so severely that it would impact on safety it's sort of like coins have had this long-term safety record and they're now trying to cash in on it that is we'll let's slip on some of these safeguards that we'll put in place over many years we'll let some of the experience go we'll push the guys further than they've ever been pushed before and hope that things don't fall apart qantas maintains it needs fewer engineers than pre-covered because its maintenance requirements are lower and says it will recruit more as flying returns to pre-covered levels it accuses unions of making baseless safety claims to further their industrial agendas but that doesn't address the worries felt by its own employees [Music] a licensed engineer at qantas told us what he and his colleagues are dealing with we're just ridiculously busy the planned work for the night we used to get through it almost what they planned for us almost every night now the first thing we do is have a look at what work is up to its time limit and has to be done so the the plane can fly the next day and we immediately start looking at what we can get rid of because we know we're not going to get through all that planned work it's just not possible people feel like they have to rush around and they aren't able to take the time that they used to be able to make sure that they're double checking and not making mistakes ian burton lives at cornell on the southern fringe of sydney's botany bay under the flight path and across the water from the airport where he used to be employed i worked in fleet presentation at qantas at sydney international airport and just presented the aircraft so when the people came on board i say wow we'd clean seats pockets lavatories um the cockpit ian was among the 1700 workers who lost their jobs when qantas outsourced ground handling was absolutely disgusted we're on job keeper we thought we'd have a job to go back to if they wanted me back tomorrow i'd go like that it was just a great family environment we looked after each other even though he loved the job he was appalled by the approach that qantas took to health and safety during the early stages of the covert outbreak when it came to cover safety i think they were very lacking they thought there was no need for us to clean the aircraft with masks on so we weren't given proper antibacterial spray weren't given cloths really to do the job we're just giving a normal cloth add a bit of water with it clean the tables down their attitude was she'll be right like even doing bathrooms we had no antibacterial sprays and that's the one place you'd think of doing cleaning a lavatories with so many people on board the aircraft you'd need that how do you feel about that overall i overall i thought that was pretty low because you you put yourself in a customer's point you expect everything to be sparkling nice and fresh everything's sanitary it's clean but behind the scenes it's pretty disgusting qantas insists that employees cleaning aircraft did use chemical disinfectant yet safe work new south wales found otherwise it slapped an improvement notice on qantas after inspecting a plane which might have transported passengers with covert 19 where workers were required to handle wet and used tissues used face masks soiled nappies and occasionally had to clean vomit and blood off surfaces without mandated personal protective equipment the inspector also saw qantas staff wiping over multiple tray tables with the same wet cloth with no disinfectant qantas employees in customer facing roles have told us that early in the pandemic wearing masks was discouraged by managers in the beginning the qantas were not wanting our crew to wear masks or gloves and the feedback was especially in our business class area that it would scare our passengers or it wouldn't be something that the passengers wanted to see and we found that quite disturbing [Music] march april may of 2020 when we were all in lockdown covert was running right we were told not to do it it wasn't a good look it would scare the customers qantas maintains that from february 2020 it made masks available to any crew who wanted them and notes that acted ahead of government mandates and health recommendations theo ceramities worked in the ground crew at qantas in sydney he was a health and safety representative formerly responsible for safeguarding the interests of his colleagues last october safe work new south wales launched a criminal prosecution of qantas because of the way it treated him for legal reasons he can't speak about the case quite frankly theo ceremoties is a hero of the pandemic he was fully trained in workplace health and safety procedures he was in charge of a cleaning gang on the planes and when the plane started to come in from china when we knew the virus was around he was concerned he wrote to the company he wrote to management and set out his concerns asking management what they were doing to address the risk that the virus presented [Music] fearing infection employees were reluctant to work on planes arriving from china [Music] in a formal warning letter qantas ordered employees to do the work or risk discipline reaction being taken against you up to and including termination of your employment it claimed the risk of aircraft workers contracting coronavirus as a result of working on aircraft is negligible and branded the workers concerns as unreasonable theo ceramiti said to his workforce as he was entitled to do under the laws we won't clean this plane we'll stop work until we can get some assurances from the company that will be properly trained we have appropriate equipment and then we can get some assurances that this plane is not infected with the virus they stood him down and that's still to this day the subject of court proceedings [Music] according to qantas theo ceramites was stood down amid allegations he incited unprotected industrial action by discouraging workers from cleaning planes well what happened to theo i thought was so disgusting because he was looking after not just mine but everybody worked on the aircraft's interest just to make sure we were safe on board and management just didn't care less about him and they've put him out to dry as a scapegoat which really isn't the australian way you look after each other covert was a disaster for aviation right now all airlines are in the middle of the biggest crisis our industry has ever ever faced and the impact will be felt for a long time particularly i'm sorry to say the impact on our people [Music] qantas retrenched 10 000 people a third of its workforce it argues it had no choice that without deep cuts it would have gone broke but covert was also an opportunity on a permanent basis we plan to deliver around one billion dollars in annual cost savings from financial year 23. we announced our high-level plan for recovery at the end of june over three years it will save us 15 billion dollars that is achieved by hard decisions like job losses and ongoing stand downs of our people the quest to cut costs at qantas is nothing new since it was privatised 30 years ago it's had to compete against airlines with lower labor costs and management has crafted tough and creative ways to bring down the wages bill its strategies go to the heart of a debate about where the balance lies between fairness and a company's right to boost the bottom line hello there matthew hey stephen how are you going very well very welcome come on in i've opened the door to the world you've got the world on your wall you have indeed this is my little reminder i was never great at geography so putting this here reminds me of the world that i've managed to see and how long did you work for qantas so i was with the qantas group of companies for just shy of 16 years so my entire time there flying as cabin crew i never worked for the company proper so i managed to work for wholly owned subsidiaries or labour higher firms during my time but i always flew under the qantas tail so to put it simply my entire time i wore a qantas uniform and i flew on a qantas branded aircraft but never actually worked for qantas airways what was that all about uh this is how the company moves forward now so by creating these wholly owned subsidiaries and small silo companies as they do that they manage to water down the pay and conditions each time to slowly erode the high value of pain conditions that once existed in the legacy part of the airline so this is my little coffee table of memories did you join the quantities matthew alsop was hired by a new qantas subsidiary qantas cabin crew australia in advance of the launch of the qantas a380s that's my 10-year service pin he worked alongside staff employed by other qantas subsidiaries in different countries on entirely different pay i spent eight and a half years on the a380 aircraft so probably my favorite aircraft i i ever worked on i was part of the startup crew for that within the airline but on that aircraft on any given day you would have crew employed under four different contracts so we had a wholly owned new zealand based subsidiary um the uk base subsidiary and then you had your two australian subsidiaries and when you equated their hourly rates and conditions one legacy crew for example would get you two kiwis three uk's or two qantas cabin crew australia's so all four of those working together side by side pushing carts handing out meals on one plane george orwell summed it up perfectly in his quote that all animals are created equal but some animals are more equal than others and that was our working environment onboard that aircraft every day on qantas domestic hourly base rates can vary from about 40 for legacy staff down to just 23 for newer staff hired through a subsidiary i don't work for a teen coffee company i work in a safety environment and i work on a heavy piece of machinery i am the airline's first responder if there is a fire i'm required to run towards it if there is a medical emergency i'm required to run towards it and render all help so for that critical safety sensitive role basically people are now being paid the same as if they worked in a fast food outlet or worked at a supermarket how does qantas rank as an employer i think it's fair to say qantas is a militant employer it's being prepared to take every angle under the act it's being prepared to take really destructive decisions uh in pursuit of the bottom line [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] people who come to work with us should be getting the same rate of pay that we get in 2011 qantas took one of the most militant industrial actions the country has ever seen we have decided to ground the qantas international and domestic fleets immediately i repeat we are grounding the qantas fleet now the extraordinary move left tens of thousands of passengers stranded worldwide it was a response to protracted union campaigns for new agreements with job security clauses the twu was offered an exceptional deal but is sticking to its completely unrealistic claim that would prevent us from the sensible use of contractors [Applause] [Music] qantas scored a decisive win to stem the economic harm their work intervened and throughout the union demands qantas inflicted massive damage on its own brand on consumers and on the economy in order to engineer an outcome and what it wanted was ultimately to be able to outsource its ground handling and other operations it was totally unnecessary i believe it could have been a negotiated settlement only did it cause massive anxiety to qantas families but broke the trust between qantas pilots and the company and i don't think it's ever been recovered pilot keith marriott is a qantas veteran my career started with qantas in 1984. i had a glorious career which finished in december 2020 so 36 years with the company i had a command on the 747 when i was age 37 so i was absolutely blessed and i totally enjoyed my time with qanus i considered it to be one of the greatest privileges that anyone could have i couldn't have scripted a better career this photograph is a boeing 767 it's the type of airplane that i got my first command on back in 1994. for a couple of years keith marriott was active in the pilots association on top of his qantas job how do you feel about what's happening with qantas now i'm saddened deeply saddened both as an ex-qantas captain and as a frequent flyer i've been loyal to the company for a long time i don't think they value their workforce i think the workforce are taken for granted i think the passengers are taken for granted and you know their greatest asset is a loyal workforce i don't know what the answer is um certainly they need they need to have a look at the entire business model and figure that nickel and diming people is not the way to make this airline profitable and functional once again he says qantas has played divide and conquer for pilots job security is everything it takes a long time to become a pilot you put a lot of hard work into it you basically fully commit your life to the job there's no other job which is under so much scrutiny and you're trying to a very high level but your skills are not portable therefore job security is absolutely paramount and pilots cherish their job security and unfortunately that has been used in successive ebas as a threat to the pilots if you don't comply with what we want we'll find someone else that will in terms of pilots one of the things that qantas has done very successfully because the law allows them to is that they've acquired or set up subsidiary airline groups and then what they do is they play one group of pilots off another group and essentially threaten to take the flying that a group of pilots is currently doing and give it to another group of pilots [Music] qantas is soaring to new heights on track to launch the world's longest non-stop commercial flight while journalists did puff pieces on qantas's plans for ultra long-haul flights on new planes we joined the flight at heathrow as guests of the airline they missed the industrial relations backstory qantas told its long-haul pilots that unless they met its investment case for the new planes it would have no choice but to give the work to a new company employing new pilots that can provide the cost base we need ultimately they put a metaphorical gun to our head and they said to us that if you don't agree to these terms and conditions it's a one-off deal and if we don't agree to the terms and conditions that were being offered then that they would give that flying to another entity it used the same tactic with short-haul pilots the stress affiliated with this is underestimated when you mix a safety critical role with the threat of losing your job then it really only ends one way a mistake will be made there will be an incident and there could be devastating consequences as a result and i believe that qantas management are underestimating the impact of their behavior qantas ground handler don dixon is heading from southwestern sydney to a pub not far from the airport he's meeting up there with some of his old workmates it's great to catch up you know we have a bit of a laugh about the old times and some of the things that happen for many years don was the chief union delegate for the workers qantas retrenched now sometimes he's more like a lifeline counsellor how many calls do you get i could get sometimes 20 a day wow wow [Applause] g'day guys hey how are you doing this is stephen from the abc g'day steve four corners steve big on oh wow interesting times isn't it oh it is interesting time so what about the uh executives coming out onto the ramp on the day of the gathering news had broken that qantas wanted at least a hundred managers to volunteer to work as baggage handlers in a desperate bid to stem the flight delays and cancellations i think an executive's going to be on his knees for you know an hour in a turn you know lifting 32 kilo bags a whole full i'm not talking about one bag i'm talking about 150 bags and freight were you slightly amused when you saw that they were going to get managers to do the jobs that you used to do i was just i was just shocked that they were going to use managers and executives to do it it's not an easy thing to learn overnight it takes months to learn how to load an aircraft last year the federal court ruled that qantas unlawfully terminated these workers and their 1700 colleagues it found that qantas seized on a vanishing window of opportunity to retrench the workers when they were stood down during covet and before they gained the right to take lawful industrial action i've got a family that i need to support i'm dealing with other issues at the moment but it was a hollow victory with the work already outsourced they didn't get their jobs back well the court ultimately said too hard to unscramble the egg and even if we did if we reinstated these workers qantas has made it clear and we accept that they would simply suck the workers again 25th of august this year and it's a big day for alan joyce the release of the annual financial results he's fronting the media it's fair to say this has been an extremely challenging time for the qantas group for our people and unfortunately for our customers delayed flights unsurprisingly qantas posted a big loss but the boss is upbeat our demand is at record levels at the moment we're actually seeing huge demand in leisure in business we're winning corporate accounts we're not losing after some fairly time questions from journalists we put to him a core issue raised by this report mr joyce is it fair to have people working side by side doing the same job employed by different companies on entirely different rates of pay all wearing the qantas uniform um well steven that's that's the thing that's done that's the thing that's done around the industry and there's a lot of other companies do the exact same thing on it what we've had to do over the years is become efficient to be able to compete in a very competitive market i would say that the australian domestic market is the most competitive in the world we've seen airlines like virgin like bonsai like rex come into the american start up from scratch and the national carrier to survive has to has to have has to have adapted to it is it fair well it's it's a necessity for for us to keep to keep our business going the qantas strategy is now under threat there is a new federal government elected on a mandate of saying jobs same pay how are you anticipating that will affect your business model so same same job same pay we're obviously like everybody talking at the government about it but can i ask so how do you define that so somebody flying at dash aids should they get the same pay as somebody flying an a380 because it's the same job it's a pilot what about cabin crew working side by side employed by different entities some within the qantas group stephen i'd ask you to respect that we're here to talk about the results [Applause] we spent two months trying to secure an interview with alan joyce he demanded any interview must run in one long continuous take as if it was live to air which doesn't fit the four corners format i'm happy to do it you've got an invite from me to do a full sit-down interview to do a live you can have me for 15 minutes 20 minutes to cover all these issues my efforts to interview him here were cut short not long after i was escorted from the building by security get back to profit the qantas boss says the worst of the delays cancellations and baggage woes is over and service will soon be back to normal but we will fix it and it's going to be fixed pretty rapidly and we know the brand will recover rebuilding trust with the public and its workforce might take longer [Music] the cuts that have come from the decisions of management have been incredibly incredibly deep and i feel like it's possibly too deep which is now impacting upon the customer experience we always used to love working for qantas and now it just makes us feel like you know we're disposable and almost like the company hates us i feel like the staff have been beaten down especially the staff that we deal with on a day-to-day basis around aeroplanes ground staff check-in staff they've been yeah they've been beaten down they're not the same [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: ABC News In-depth

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Length: 44min 35sec (2675 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 05 2022