- The Guardian
- Issue #2161
In action movies, towards the end, there’s often a moment of triumph. The villain’s plans are revealed. All the world knows about their evil scheme. When that happens, it’s all over. That’s it for the villain. In real life, sadly, the villain often just shrugs it off. They spin the revelation, or they just wait for people to think about something else.
In the case of Qantas, they didn’t even have to wait.
Qantas has been fined $90 million by the High Court, not for sacking 1800 staff during Covid, but for doing it illegally. Even better, the court has directed that a large chunk of that money go to the Transport Workers’ Union, which stuck by workers who were sacked to make way for contractors. The TWU will put the money to good use, fighting for hard-pressed transport workers as they should.
It looks like a ‘villain’s downfall’ moment, and if this were a film we would be hearing uplifting happy music. Since life isn’t a movie, here’s what happened. Qantas didn’t care. Qantas shareholders obviously didn’t care. The company remains profitable and its shares are riding high. They’ve been nicknamed ‘teflon shares’ by financial commentators. The shares, company and executives have sailed through this $90 million fine. They also sailed through an earlier scandal of Qantas systematically selling tickets for flights they knew had been cancelled. When that happened, the high-profile CEO Alan Joyce left with an obscenely large payout, while his deputy took over and tried to pretend that was some kind of fresh start. She was in office during the whole scandal as well as during the illegal sackings that have just cost the company $90 million.
What does this tell us? Firstly, privatisation does not produce the promised results. Privatisation is supposed to save the government and the public a lot of money while also producing efficiency in the face of competition. Qantas has very little competition domestically and isn’t about to get any soon. Like a lot of successful businesses, it’s skilled at avoiding competition. Privatisation wasn’t meant to produce an airline that sells tickets to non-existent flights, or illegal sackings, but that’s what its produced this time.
The other lesson in Qantas’ charmed existence is this: capitalism doesn’t care about people. The ‘villain revealed’ moment came and went. Villains have victims, as Qantas certainly did, but the market didn’t care about the workers or customers that Qantas victimised.
Under the system we have now, all companies have to do is worry about profits. That’s a statutory requirement of being on a board. Capitalists only think about the needs of workers if they’re forced to. Even then, what they’re worrying about is the cost.
You might think that a $90 million fine would get the market’s attention, but it hasn’t. Qantas has already ‘priced it in’ as part of the cost of doing business. As long as the airline looks profitable investors don’t care.
So if a record-breaking fine won’t make our national airline behave ethically, what will? What Qantas needs is what we all need. We need socialism, a system that works for people, that is run by the people who make the wealth. That way the welfare of workers is the starting point for any organisation. As it is, the suffering Qantas has caused and what it has cost them is just the cost of doing business.
