Fair Work Australia decision re Qantas case ... and some comments on keeping a sense of perspective

Those people who are interested in the Qantas case, which looked like stranding me and many other people, could do a lot worse than reading the actual decision by Fair Work Australia (what was once known as the Australian Industrial Relations Commission). The attachment to the decision, which sets out a timeline of events, is especially useful.

As some of you know advocacy before this tribunal (or, rather, its predecessors) made up my bread and butter work for many years, and I was at one point a fairly prominent specialist in this area of law. If some things had gone differently, maybe I'd now be a member of the tribunal, with all the attendant headaches. Although I'm out of touch with the details of current Australian labour law - a very volatile and politicised area of the law - I retain a certain interest in it that goes beyond my personal interest in getting home from the US over the next couple of days.

I've seen a great deal of uninformed speculation about this case, with many people expressing pet theories that seem to have little basis in reality. As far as I can see, both the unions and the employer have simply followed the logic of the legal system as it now works in Australia, and neither is terribly culpable - much as I am not especially happy with the scare I received this week, and much as I can imagine that passengers who found themselves actually stranded in airports at the last minute must have been furious.

From here, it looks as if Qantas made a calculated gamble that an extreme move - grounding the fleet and locking out employees who were taking industrial action - would force the hands of the government and the tribunal, and lead to a rapid termination of all industrial action. That gamble has evidently paid off.

While it is a bad look for the CEO of Qantas to ground the fleet, even for a couple of days, and to take a monstrous personal pay rise during the period of an industrial dispute, his move a couple of days ago will very likely turn out to have been a smart one, possibly the best available to him in the circumstances. In the short term, at least, shareholders will probably be happy with him.

It looks as if this case could be headed for compulsory arbitration proceedings(that's if it can't be resolved by negotiations in the next few weeks).

More generally, I repeat that this is the logic of the system. The system encourages tests of industrial muscle, and there is little that an employer can do in such a tussle apart the nuclear option of locking out staff. As long as we want an enterprise-level bargaining system based around tests of relative industrial muscle between unions and particular corporations, this kind of thing will happen now and then. Such a system supposedly has micro-economic benefits in matching wages to profitability across the economy.

Of course, similar large-scale disputes and disruptions also happened under the old system of industry awards and compulsory arbitration that was traditional in decades in Australia. The only difference was that strikes and lockouts were technically unlawful under that system. They happened anyway, and I seriously doubt that any less days of work were lost. On the contrary, such episodes of disruption are probably rarer these days than in previous decades.

Some people are calling for the nationalisation of Qantas, but this dispute really has nothing to do with that. Government-owned enterprises can experience similar disruption, as has happened many times in the past, including in disputes that I was personally involved in during the 1980s, when I was a young man carving out my reputation as an industrial advocate employed by the Commonwealth government.

All in all, these sorts of disputes are unpleasant, decisions made in them can be nasty and sometimes foolish (as with the mass resignation of aircraft pilots across the industry in the celebrated 1989 pilots' disputes), and can disrupt the plans of ordinary people. The system does, however, have a certain logic, and in the case the parties have played it out. I can't see that either the trade unions or the Qantas management have actually done anything especially reprehensible here, or how they could have acted all that differently with the system currently in place.

In short, a bit of perspective is required here before we start seeing the dispute in class-warfare terms and condemning either greedy unions or evil corporate management. You get the system that is voted for, and you get the results that the system encourages. Moreover, no system can guarantee a society without industrial disruption; the point is to try to contain and manage it within broadly acceptable boundaries. That's pretty much what's happened here.

Latest news - it looks like I'll be flying home tomorrow night after all...

Voila!

World Fantasy Convention

Yesterday's panel on villains and their motivations, starring Len Wein, Kay Kenyon, John Fultz, F. Paul Wilson (moderator), and myself, seemed to go well. Up on the panel, we were all pleased afterwards: it felt like we'd had a useful discussion and left the audience wanting more. Audience feedback was uniformly good afterwards, and it was a pleasure meeting my fellow panelists.

For a combination of reasons I haven't been getting to much of the program, though I can report that the "in conversation" item with convention guests Neil Gaiman and Connie Willis was delightful - both are very engaging personalities. The mass autograph signing last night was lots of fun, as these things always are, with a large number of authors all in one room and a strong feeling of the almost familial relationship among authors.

I spent a fair bit of time at the party afterwards talking to James Bradley, Gregory Benford, and literary agent Cherry Weiner. Great to see you guys. Have also been glad to catch up with many other friends whom I don't see often enough. Once again, I'm running late this morning in getting along to the program items, but never mind ... I'm sure it'll be a good day.

The big question is whether I'll be able to fly home on Monday, given the industrial action affecting Qantas (which is currently totally grounded ) ... but I guess I'll have to deal with that problem when I get to it.

Encyclopedia of Science Fiction now online

You can find a beta text of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (third edition) online. This is, of course, an indispensable reference work. Unfortunately, many entries have not yet been updated from the 1993 second print edition. Still ... it's good that this resource is now widely and freely available.

Chrys Stevenson on Doctors in Conscience

Chrys Stevenson really nails it here.

Now, there's a lot more to say about this issue of conscientious objection in health care, and it won't surprise you to be told that I say a fair bit of it in Freedom of Religion and the Secular State.

But meanwhile, the idea that there is substantial support on a worldly basis for doctors being able to opt out of emergency abortions looks like a myth. Once you remove otherworldly considerations and esoteric moral theories that are deeply entangled with religion, you don't have much basis to object to abortions, much less to emergency abortions. It's not surprising that so many of these doctors turn out to be deeply religious, though it's surprising that so many don't own up to it freely and candidly.

I need this book

Gratefully received if one comes my way as a review copy or a pressie (Speech Matters by Katherine Gelber). Publishers take note - I'd happily review a book on this or similar subjects.

A plug for the Freethought University Alliance

Check out their site and their impressive list of affiliated speakers.

Ah iz in San Diego, California

Now I await the adventures mentioned in the previous post. My only problem at the moment is adapting to a new time zone - the flight and the transfers went very smoothly.

Okay, off to San Diego

Who knows what adventures await at the World Fantasy Convention?

Kenan Malik on stem cell research

Kenan Malik weighs in on the atrocious outcome in the European case.