26 December 2007

Industrial Action & the Qantas Response

Keeping on the theme about the right to protest and to strike (just one of many forms of protest and demonstration). A news bite from Australia has Qantas, the national flag carrier, lining up engineers that it has retrenched over the past couple of years, some as recently as last year, with outrageous salary proposals in order to break a strike.

So, I guess even in some of the world's oldest surviving parliamentary democracies the right to strike and to protest remains...just the means that businesses employ to get around the inconvenience becomes a little more devious and in some cases silly because the potential outlay here on rehiring retrenched engineers who might not even get to work is going to be huge. If I was a shareholder I would want the Board explaining the numbers to me on this one.

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