Air maintenance union engineers a pay stand-off with Qantas

Qantas is threatening to claw back overpayments to workers after it rejected union claims that more than 900 had been underpaid.

Qantas is threatening to claw back overpayments to workers after the airline angrily rejected union claims that more than 900 current and former aircraft engineers had been underpaid between $41m and $55m in recent years.

Australian Licenced Aircraft Engineers Association federal secretary Steve Purvinas made the underpayment claims in a submission to a Senate inquiry that Qantas tried to stop being publicly released.

The airline admits some aircraft engineers have been underpaid but insists some employees have also been overpaid, resulting in the “net overpayment” to current and former engineers.

Qantas refused on Wednesday to rule out clawing back any overpayments made to the engineers, and declined to put a dollar figure on the alleged overpayments.

Mr Purvinas said Qantas had admitted to $1m in underpayments, and concluded that the overpayments would therefore be at least $1m if the airline was claiming a net overpayment.

Qantas head of government relations Trent Mumford wrote to the Senate committee investi­gating unlawful employment underpayments in March, calling for the “misleading” ALAEA submission not to be made public.

Mr Mumford wrote that the submission contained “false and misleading information which, if made public, would adversely reflect on Qantas”. The committee published the submission, along with Mr Mumford’s letter.

In the submission, Mr Purvinas claims engineers had been “underpaid in the vicinity of $41m- $55m”, with the union asserting that a significant amount of the underpayments was due to the workers being entitled to be at a higher classification level than Qantas had paid them.

Mr Purvinas said on Wednesday that while many engineers might currently be properly classified, they were owed wages from the time they were not being paid at the right level. He said the union’s concerns were raised with the airline more than two years ago but no money had been repaid.

A review was being undertaken by a third party, Taylor Fry, which Mr Purvinas said was majority-owned by Qantas.

“Qantas employs an extensive industrial relations team who seemingly use any, and every, loophole in the legal system to avoid payment,” his submission said. “This includes making it difficult to meet, refusing to set out their position on matters and asking us to specify the exact nature of breaches while knowingly denying access to the information required to do that. Ultimately, when we do specify a breach, they simply do not pay.”

He said the union believed up to half the 1100 licensed maintenance engineers employed by Qantas, as well as up to 400 former employees, had been underpaid.

Qantas said on Wednesday it was “irresponsible of the union to put out figures that are blatantly wrong”.

“They are claiming $30m of ­underpayments … when the fact is there has been a net overpayment from Qantas,” a spokesman said.

He said the company had done a “very detailed analysis of a complex system that is based on tenure and qualifications”.

“The union has not. They seem to have picked a big number that will get attention,” he said.

“We are committed to making sure everyone is receiving the right rates of pay and have been communicating directly with our people on how we’re fixing any issues.”