Virgin staff ready to fight on pay deal

Flight attendants and pilots are preparing for a second round of pay deal talks after voting down Virgin Australia’s ‘best offer”.

Virgin Australia flight and cabin crew at Brisbane Airport. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

Flight attendants fear airlines are “weaponising Covid-19” to strip away hard fought for pay and conditions that had been in place for years.

National secretary of the Flight Attendants Association of Australia, Teri O’Toole expressed her concerns after members voted down a new agreement offered by Virgin in December.

Prior to the vote, Virgin chief executive Jayne Hrdlicka warned employees the new deals were the airline’s best offer, and there would be no better agreements to come.

No date has been set for the resumption of negotiations, and Ms O’Toole said she feared existing agreements could be terminated and replaced with “modern awards” that offered significantly less money.

“It seems very opportunistic to suggest that the cabin crew are the reason that airlines are in trouble,” she said.

“When things do pick up, crew will be working as hard, if not harder for lesser conditions than they were pre-pandemic and I just don’t see how that’s reasonable.”

The main objection of flight attendants to the new agreements offered by Virgin Australia was a reduction in days off and overtime.

Ms O’Toole said if their conditions were maintained, the flight attendants would accept a two-year pay freeze but she feared cabin crew would be forced to accept much less.

“The airlines are saying ‘we’ve been devastated, you’re going to have to suck it up and if you don’t we’ll just move to strike your EBA out’,” she said.

“Terminating the agreement for cabin crew would put us back on the modern award which is significantly less, about $45,000 a year. Who can survive on that living in Sydney?”

Adding to the anxiety is the expectation that any cuts Virgin Australia cabin crew accept will also be adopted by Qantas in order to for it remain competitive.

As flight attendants awaited the next move by Virgin, the Australian Federation of Air Pilots was satisfied progress was being made.

AFAP executive director Simon Lutton said they had recently met with management after surveying members on why 90 per cent voted down Virgin’s new pay offer.

He said the surveys showed there was good potential to reach agreement, and he was optimistic.

“Our membership via the survey results, has shown a willingness to move in some areas,” Mr Lutton said.

“Productivity system changes and various other efficiencies are doable. What the pilots don’t want to see is widespread change for the sake of it.”

A bargaining timeline was now being prepared by management with more talks expected in coming weeks.

As cabin crew awaited a recall to the negotiating table, Ms O’Toole said of even greater concern was the looming cut-off date for JobKeeper.

Ms Hrdlicka recently warned more jobs would be at risk if the $1000-a-fortnight allowance was axed, with 3000 stood down workers reliant on the payments.

“There’s a lot of crew who haven’t been able to get secondary jobs, they’ve been relying on JobKeeper and when that stops I don’t know what they’re going to do,” Ms O’Toole said.

“It’s going to get ugly I think.”