Five "Whys?" - Global government and airline lockstep leads to today's predictable outcome

This is not rocket science. This is a repetitive question and a bit of logic.

You do not need to be expert in anything to work out first, second and third order effects of Covid policy in aviation. You don’t need to be legally trained to also work out that most of Covid policy implementation by both governments and corporations is likely illegal or has been implemented illegally.

Irrespective of whether you can or did work anything out, as of today you should simply ask “why?” and keep asking “why?” at least five times, to get somewhere close to root cause.

Governments outsource their dirty work. Outsourcing combined with government contracts can structurally result in over charging. Why? Because everyone knows that governments control money and have budgets that “need” to be spent. They also know that once into a contract, more money can be made through exploitation of the change process, and the inherent incompetence and confusion in government procurement and development that feeds that process. Once you are the contractual supplier/incumbent, you are locked in and others are locked out, so then you play a game of tactical margin growth. If it's more expensive to cancel the contract than it is to keep it going (politically or financially) the cash cow can continue being milked. See UK’s HS2 cost escalation.

But is this the case for Australian vaccine mandates?

In this context, the Australian government implemented vaccine mandates through private (Virgin Australia) and public (QANTAS Jetstar) corporations but “price” isn't just measured in money, as both the government and corporations are either slowly learning or knew all along.

This excellent article in Spectator Australia by Alexandra Marshall, “Freedom Flyers: the fight against vaccine mandates”, gives much needed overview of the state of affairs in Aussie airlines.

Nico Burmeister, a barrister acting on behalf of Jetstar and Qantas, said that:

‘They [the documents pertaining to the case] are unintelligible and rambling documents that are inappropriate to take the case any further. In my 20 years of practice I’ve never seen a statement of claim that appears to break every pleading rule. It seems to break all of the rules and every part of it, in my submission, albeit that’s not what I’m asking to be done today, is liable to be struck out.’

To give context to Burmeister’s statement, initially it was argued by QANTAS Jetstar that the former staff plaintiffs’ pleadings were so broad in scope that, according to the airline defendants, the case should be thrown out and dealt with by a Royal Enquiry. The plaintiffs’ position was that the breadth of their claims were simply reflective of the scale of the airline’s infractions. Within the claims were elements of discrimination that were objected to by the airlines but, to his credit, the judge remains willing to hear.

The case is progressing. This week, a directions hearing has led to the establishment of facts and submission of evidence and counter evidence, with the next hearing scheduled for December 2022. This first case features many aspects of employment law but others in the pipeline will cover other areas including medical issues.

Some interesting issues in play include:

• A medically unqualified/unlicensed party (airline management) issuing medical instructions/advice to people (staff). This, it shall be argued, is simply illegal;

• The issuance of threats (“no jab, no job”) by the airlines to staff;

• Those threats placing staff under duress to submit to medical interventions (Covid-19 “vaccination”);

• The staff’s duress making it illegal for any medical practitioner to administer the mandated medical interventions once in possession of knowledge of the recipient’s duress;

• Any medical practitioner administering medical treatment to a patient under duress is considered to have committed an act of battery;

• The ongoing status of Covid-19 “vaccines” being:

  • Still in ongoing clinical trial;

  • Black triangle labelled medicines;

  • known to cause severe and fatal side effects.

• A statement issued by an airline stating to the court that should the court recognise certain material facts then the airline in question would be found to have possibly acted criminally, thus its corporate interests would be under threat. Aussie Freedom Flyers are in possession of a copy of that letter.

This is not new. Not in the immediate or the distant past

Of note is the very nature of the methods employed by government and airlines against their citizens and employees, not just now but repeatedly throughout the past.

Circa 1700 QANTAS baggage handlers won a recent case challenging QANTAS’ deliberate actions to outsource its ground handling operation to contractor Swissport as a means to undercut and dissolve its in-house ground handling staff.

Qantas will go to the High Court after losing its appeal against a 2021 ruling that the outsourcing was unlawful and partially driven by many of the axed workers being union members with stronger bargaining capability.

The full bench of the Federal Court in May unanimously rejected Qantas’ first appeal against the decision.

But the judges rejected a cross-appeal from the union that the fired workers should get their jobs back because of the cost to Qantas, which had dissolved the subsidiary company that employed them.

A spokesman for Qantas apologised to customers who have had a delay in getting their luggage and blamed staff shortages for disruption at airports.

“The union has pointed to Qantas’ decision in 2020 to outsource the rest of our in-house ground handling as a key reason the restart has been challenging. It’s not,” the spokesman said.

“We had completed the outsourcing before Easter 2021 when domestic travel was back at almost 100 per cent, and we didn’t have the issues we had at Easter this year.”

He said affected employees had been offered support to transition to new jobs and some had taken up work with labour hire contractors.

The TWU is calling on the Albanese government to introduce an independent aviation tribunal, which the union says would help lift standards in the industry.

Despite the court ruling in favour of the former employees, QANTAS has not reverted or rectified the situation and continues to appeal.

Airlines have form here when it comes to outsourcing to undercut and then excise their own staff as a direct means to cut costs.

Nearly a decade ago, a British airline outsourced its Gatwick ground handling to a contractor, who was unable to adequately staff the contract in time for the summer season, leading to major ground handling delays. A factor in this was the lead time to get new contractor staff issued with airside passes, a process involving criminal background checks. This is an obvious factor to anyone operating in the airside environment but it seemed to have been overlooked and contributed to staff shortages. The contractor tried to compensate by bringing in temporary foreign labour to meet the shortfall but those staff weren’t all legally able to work in the UK and so the problem didn’t go away. In the end, the airline created a new ground handling subsidiary of its own and cancelled the outsourcing. Net effect? A season of major customer and service disruption that ultimately resulted in a net cheaper subsidiary ground handling operation. See what they did there? They used outsourcing to cut the costs, then when the outsourcing failed (as a result of the airline selecting that flawed outsourced solution) it then locked in the cost cuts when it brought the ground handling services back in house under its direct control. In management terms, this is a net win. No one in the airline was punished for failure and the responsible manager was promoted.

More than a decade ago, a former employee of a now defunct UK airline described to GAAC that airline’s attempt at similar with its ground handling. It turned out that the outsource contractor ended up employing some Somalian “freedom fighters” whose legal ability to work in the UK was questionable, to say the least, and resulted in staff shortages and service disruption.

In short, none of this is new. It is airline management standard operating procedure to achieve brutal cost cutting via any technique, irrespective of whether it is done legally and/or will have to go through a significant pain barrier that impacts customer experience and ultimately revenue flow. The question is, why?

(In)Competence? Or something else

If airline management has organisational knowledge/memory of past successes and, more importantly, past “failures”, why would one seek to repeat those failures and suffer the attendant costs? In order to evaluate success or failure, one must be able to conduct a “cost of business” calculation. In simple terms, did the cost of one’s business decision (and actions) exceed the net savings or net profit resulting from that decision? If it did, that could be deemed failure and vice versa, where the term “cost” is a catch all that would have to include the full spectrum of actual costs, including corollary legal action, rulings and rectification.

Bear in mind the concept of the “long game”. What may look like a “cost of business” failure today may turn out to be a success on a five or ten year plus time horizon. This is a key factor in business and airline management. This is how businesses re-engineer themselves and constantly drive down employee terms and conditions. They are willing to take pain in the short term to inflict it over the long term against their internal structure, which includes (and is dominated by) their staff.

Indeed, humans are a resource. Staff “churn” is beneficial. The less time many staff spend in a business, the less chance they have to progress on a contract and become “expensive” just by virtue of inflation wage corrections. Churn also undermines the employment rights that increase as a function of time served. Every time you recruit a person, you have the possibility of issuing a new contract that provides new staff with less or that demands more from them. Notionally, it is the role of unions to exercise collective bargaining power as a counterbalance on inherently rabid corporate objectives. Unions are simple, captive theatrical players who do not serve the interests of their members. Proof of this exists throughout history, but it is most starkly proven by their complicity with government and corporate agendas throughout Covid, which have culminated in what looks like operational chaos and failure and, worse, the reduction in airline safety that is being deliberately ignored.

Airline “new joiner” contracts are another corporate outsourcing of government mandates

According to what you will or, more importantly, won’t have read, there is no UK airline vaccine mandate, right? Wrong.

For some time, Virgin Atlantic has had a Covid-19 vaccine mandate in its new joiner pilot contract. So too does a little known airline, Titan Airways.

Not one word has been said about this in public, anywhere. The UK pilot unions, BALPA and IPA, have done and said nothing about it and neither have challenged these contractual requirements’ legality or appropriateness.

Why?

By comparison VPV, the Dutch pilot union, successfully challenged KLM’s new pilot joiner mandate clause on the grounds of invasion of privacy and lack of corporate justification.

What does this tell you about the UK government (including regulators), airlines and the UK labour unions?

Net impact on aviation as of today

Let’s go back to Australia as a microcosm of air travel.

• QANTAS was found to have acted illegally in bypassing its own ground handling staff via an outsourcing process that has failed to deliver the clearly understood, long-standing business requirements of airline ground services. Costs have been incurred as a result.

• QANTAS Jetstar is in court to face claims that it has illegally sacked staff against coercive and illegally implemented (if not completely illegal) Covid-19 “vaccination” mandates. Costs are being incurred.

• Where that corporate mandate is supposedly legitimised by overarching government mandate, the laws that are claimed to have been infringed are not aviation specific. They are fundamental employment, medical, discrimination and human rights laws that apply across society. Costs have and continue to be incurred across society, and these costs far exceed money alone. They include fundamental, permanent and unrecoverable societal costs (including suicide).

Step back and consider all of the above.

This is not a single corporate or even publicly owned entity acting alone. Multiple public and private entities have acted in direct concert with government to pursue an agenda of societal change via means which were known to those implementing them to have been illegal before implementation, execution and enforcement.

Any government and corporate lawyer tasked with anticipating the scale, impact and legality of the above would not have been able to say with certainty that what was ultimately implemented was legal and had precedent.

What has been done, at speed, sought to render change in society at whatever cost with the known and accepted risk that should any of it eventually be challenged in law and found lacking, further costs would be incurred by all parties involved and society at large. If a government or public entity is sued and loses, the money it pays out in damages ultimately comes from the public purse and is borne by citizens.

Known or anticipated first, second and third order effects

Ask yourself this question:

Could you, based on what you know of Covid policy combined with a sense of what businesses and people must consider when taking serious decisions, have anticipated some or all of the immediate and knock-on effects of the policies that airlines have pursued, be that outsourcing of their baggage handling or the mandating of their staff to submit, under duress, to experimental gene therapies? Even if, for some reason, you can’t, is it reasonable to expect that either government or experienced corporate personnel and lawyers can?

If all those people failed to imagine, work out and/or anticipate the first, second and third order effects of such massive changes in policy, are they to be considered competent? It is the job of government to represent citizens’ interests, in all their diversity and minority. It is the legal requirement of corporations to factor their legal, ethical and moral obligations to staff and the limits of their power and interests (especially when they run counter to their employment law obligations) when they make decisions and implement them.

How and why have governments and airlines across the globe coincidentally created the present situation in aviation? One that comprises predictable first, second and third order effects of their own policies, which happen to include the pursuit of deliberate human cost cutting (read decimation), that demonstrably incur large costs across all aspects of the business, customer and societal spheres?

What is this? Incompetence? Negligence? Fundamentally, why is it occurring and why does it clearly involve both governments and corporations who are directly interlinked and interdependent in their relationships?

Why have things that are provably and possibly illegal been implemented when it was easy to anticipate that they were illegal before anyone implemented them?

There’s more than five “whys?” in this article. It doesn’t matter. The trick is to just keep asking why until you find yourself at the bottom of the barrel, sitting on root cause and amongst the bottom feeders.