Qantas resumes flights after bitter labour row

QANTAS Airways planes returned to the skies yesterday after an Australian court ruled on a bitter labour dispute that had prompted the world’s 10th-largest airline to ground its entire fleet.

A flight from Sydney to Jakarta, Indonesia, took off shortly after Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority gave the “Flying Kangaroo” the all-clear to resume flying.

Qantas said it still expected some delays as it works to clear the backlog of 70,000 customers affected by the nearly 48-hour grounding. The airline added extra flights and expects its schedule to return to normal within one or two days.

The airline’s resumption of flights came around 12 hours after an emergency ruling by an arbitration court ended weeks of strikes and cancelled a staff lockout.

The court ruling was a major victory in the airline’s battle with unions representing pilots, aircraft mechanics, baggage handlers and caterers, whose rolling strikes have forced the cancellation of 600 flights in recent months, costing Qantas 70 million Australian dollars.

But aviation experts said the surprise grounding of all 108 planes on Saturday, at a cost of $20m a day, has hurt the carrier’s reputation around the world. Moody’s said it could downgrade the airline’s credit ratings.

Irish-born chief executive Alan Joyce praised the ruling, which prevents unions from taking further strike action over demands for pay hikes and job security clauses under contracts being negotiated.

“The important thing is that all industrial action is now over and we have certainty,” Joyce said.

Other industry veterans said the lockout was a daring move that will pay off for Qantas, which wants to expand the low-cost, low-fare model it uses at its Jetstar Airways subsidiary.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard yesterday described the grounding as “extreme”, while transport minister Tony Albanese sharply criticised Joyce for giving the government only three hours notice of his plans.

Workers have held rolling strikes and refused overtime work for weeks out of worry that some of Qantas’s 32,500 jobs would be moved overseas in a restructuring plan.

The unions wanted the court to temporarily suspend the employee lockout so that strike action could resume if negotiations in the labour dispute failed to progress.

But the airline said the strikes had devastated the airline’s reputation for reliability and that the threat needed to be removed permanently before customers would return.