Joyce should not have got away with what he did which was clearly deceitful and probably illegal...but the media spun things his way and the regulators folded like they do these days.
The media regularly supports the Big Lies: WMDs, Mining royalties as "death to Australia's cash cow" (Ask Norway and Nauru, and most economists about that one!), Children Overboard, Corporate welfare, etc.
While most folks are tightening belts and reigning in spending, these execs give themselves pay-rises!
When a society goes regressive it will slow, stagnate and "internal resistance" will force a decline. The Extremely Wealthy appear to have entered the "third inheritance generation" where they no longer believe they belong with us regular human beings. Whilst institutionalised poverty is now accepted, they may find that the next logical shift to slavery is not so easy!

Just a thought... is this the full Pilger piece? It seems to dribble to a close far earlier than I would expect, and the punchline - "the paper said the airline had to 'compete or die'" - is very... mild.

There is a heap more about the Qantas story you can get cross about, Mr Pilger. Instead of giving them both barrels of a 12 gauge, this article is more of a feeble squirt from a half-filled water pistol.

By concentrating on Joyce's pay, he entirely fails to mention Qantas' precipitous decline in cabin service levels, the frequency of arbitrarily cancelled flights in non-peak hours to low-traffic destinations, the truly appalling treatment of frequent fliers and the impossibility of their scheduling a "reward" flight, the complete rip-off of their pricing system that charges you for a Qantas flight then bundles you willy-nilly onto Jetstar... the list of crimes goes on.

The sad truth is that the airline is being slowly mis-managed into oblivion. Joyce's gamesmanship with the government and the unions is just another chapter in this, seemingly never-ending, story.

The internet's virtual travel Vs a long haul airline by the name of Quantas fighting to stay competitive, How dose this so called reporter earn a living outside scare campaigns?

Joyce was facing slow continual financial sabotage from the unions, who felt that they could damage Quantas with impunity as long as they wanted.

Joyce's grounding of the fleet was a master stroke. As a Quantas passenger I never new when the Union's would close the flights, and the grounding brought back certainty and reliability to the brand.

That John Pilger is up in arms, shows that Joyce is on the money.

We are looking at the most competitive high tech industry on the planet.Qantas works on 8-12 cents per passenger per km to pay for the planes,infrastructure and Govt BS.In a shrinking market,Qantas will cease to exist in it's present form and Govt should not bail out it like it is doing for GMH.Let them fail.Let the banks fail.

There is no such viable concept as too big to fail.The real economy of production is what is worth saving.Decrease the size of Govt and end the coounterfeiting practises of the Fractional Reserve System of Banking.

A slow continual sabotage of qantas, so why did Joice not talk to them.
Those people were the lowest paid, this is probably why the ignorance.
The FWA cleaned it up in no time.
Should be the first port of call. Would have saved millions without disruption.

Fair Work Australia laws was designed by the federal ALP govt to return unprecedented power to unions. Qantas was bleeding to death via a 1000 cuts and Joyce had no option but to use Fair Work Australia regulations to maintain the company's economic position. It's absolutely laughable for Pilger to state "This unprecedented action was the climax of a plan to crush the unions" - this action was the final desperate act of a company that was trying to prevent a union taking over the airline. Without this action, Qantas could not have remained viable but would instead have gone the way of Ansett, Compass, PanAm, Swissair and BOAC.

I assume Pilger still lives in the UK so his knowledge of what was happening in Australia at the time of this dispute would have been derived mainly from the UK media. Nonetheless, his ignorance of what was happening here is no excuse for such a poorly informed or deliberately biased article that ignores the truth.

I am forever impressed by the ability of some to see every situation is stark black and white.

I don't see Qantas behaviour over the past couple of years as a one-dimensional union issue, for example, as Bernie Masters appears to:

>>this action was the final desperate act of a company that was trying to prevent a union taking over the airline.<<

Union activity has played no part (I can only assume) in the gradual but persistent decline in cabin service standards. Nor, I would imagine, are they involved in the arbitrary cancellation of regional flights, for no discernible reason. Nor yet, that they have a hand in the policy and management of the bordering-on-criminal Frequent Flyer scam, and its associated credit-card-related near-felonies. And I can only conjecture that that unions do not determine whether a flight with QF code actually flies in Jetstar livery - with the consequent theft of Frequent Flyer points.

There's more to running an airline than taming unions, however necessary that may have been.

Pericles: in a free market economy, customers who don't wish to sign up to the Frequent Flyer scheme can choose not to sign up. Ultimately, of course, if they don't like flying with Qantas because of reduced cabin service, they can choose to fly with other airlines. But for the airline itself, it has no choice but to work out what everyone hopes is a fair and equitable arrangement with its employees to allow the airline to operate safely and profitably. Since the ALP came to power federally, Fair Work Australia has changed the rules of the game and three unions were abusing their powers. In addition to costing Qantas customers and hence income, they were demanding the right to negotiate on job permanency, a prerogative of management. I applaud Joyce for having the courage to virtually risk everything in standing up to these 3 unions.
The picture is more complex than this, of course, as you suggest, but Joyce in my view had no other option but to lock-out the unions and go for broke, even if it damaged the Qantas brand and cost the company money in the short term.