Almost 500 Qantas engineers have walked of the job for 24 hours in an industrial action bid for better working conditions and pay

ABC NEWS (Australia)

About 500 Qantas workers have walked off the job across the country over an ongoing pay dispute. The action is taking place on one of the busiest travel days of the year.

Transcript

00:00So far, we haven't had any reports of major disruptions to flights in and out of Australia's

00:08biggest capital city airports. As you mentioned there, this is set to be one of the busiest

00:15days at Australian airports since before the pandemic. We have hearing reports from some

00:21airports that there's been some cancelled flights this morning. However, it's unclear

00:25if that is related to the strikes. I'm hearing that potentially, if there is disruptions,

00:32they wouldn't be until this afternoon. However, if there are disruptions due to these flights,

00:38due to the strikes of the engineers, it could result in chaos due to how busy the airports

00:43are. We're hearing that some flights simply have no spare seats on them. So if one plane

00:49ends up grounded due to these strikes, then that could mean that there's simply nowhere

00:54else for passengers to fly. We have around 500 workers striking today for 24 hours. They

01:02are the sorts of engineers that work on planes that specifically do things like tow them

01:07back from the terminal. And the reason why this could result in issues with the airports

01:13and flights today is if we have one plane that could have an issue, there simply won't

01:18be enough workers around to tow it back from the terminals to replace it with another one.

01:23The unions representing these engineers and Qantas have been in dispute since around the

01:29middle of this year when their latest enterprise bargaining agreement expired. They already

01:35went on strike back in October, and their union says that now, after failing to reach

01:40a deal on better pay and conditions with the airline, that they've decided to strike again

01:45now for 24 hours. The airline, however, says that they think that they are giving a fair

01:51deal to these workers, that they're working on negotiations, and they say that they've

01:54put contingencies in place today so that there isn't disruptions to passengers.

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