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.