The Qantas boss, Alan Joyce, will pocket millions in bonuses despite customer fury over service failures, lost bags, and cancelled flights, and union anger over staff pay.
Joyce will also stay on as chief executive officer until at least the end of next year, the Qantas chair, Richard Goyder, confirmed at the airline’s annual general meeting on Friday.
Joyce’s take-home pay last financial year was $2.27m, up from $1.98m the year before.
On top of that base salary, shareholders voted overwhelmingly to award Joyce bonus performance rights worth about $4m, which can be vested in August next year.
In the same week Choice awarded Qantas a Shonky for its customer service, shareholders also voted in favour of Joyce receiving long-term rights amounting to about $5m, deferred for three years.
Other short-term bonuses, all of which were deferred during the pandemic, could also be added depending on performance.
During the AGM, Goyder criticised the federal government’s planned industrial relations changes, saying multi-employer bargaining would “effectively lead to centralised wage setting”, which would in turn affect productivity.
He said workers were on average paid more than $100,000 a year already – a figure the Transport Workers’ Union called “wildly misleading” because some workers are on less than half that, while others (such as Joyce) are on far more.
Joyce warned a new Covid wave could see another spike in sick leave, although he said there was now more resilience in the system.
He said the pandemic was the “biggest crisis” the airline had ever faced, but the company was turning it around, hoped to get back to 70% of market share, and would spend $200m on extra staff and plane availability to improve resilience.
The TWU called the AGM a “farce and a wasted opportunity”, because the board would have delivered Joyce a bonus in cash even if shareholders voted against the bonus future shares.
The TWU national secretary, Michael Kaine, said it was “was literally impossible for Joyce not to walk away multimillions richer”.
“Shareholders should have been able to cast a genuine vote on the reinstatement of illegally sacked workers, costly legal battles, and a post-Joyce future for the tarnished airline,” he said.
“Every trick in the Qantas book deliberately undermines the enterprise bargaining system, fragments the workforce and gives Qantas great commercial power over workers’ pay and conditions from afar through cut-price contracts with labour providers.”
Thousands of staff were laid off or stood down during the pandemic, and baggage handling was outsourced, which many blamed for bags going missing from flights, although Qantas said the outsourcing was not to blame.
In June this year, Qantas had the highest flight cancellation rate of any Australian airline. It was also in protracted battles with staff over wages and conditions, even after predicting an underlying profit before tax of up to $1.3bn for the six months to the end of this year.
Meanwhile, the airline picked up $2bn in taxpayer funds, and was hotly criticised for executive pay increases. Qantas denied they were pay rises, rather a return to the salary level in their contracts after pay reductions during the pandemic.
Before the meeting, Qantas issued a statement saying its performance had improved after “hitting a low point” in July.
Flight cancellations are happening in 2.2% of flights, which is below pre-Covid levels, the airline said. In June, 7.5% of flights were cancelled.
“Mishandled” bags are at six in 1,000 passengers, which is “almost” back to pre-Covid levels. Twice that many were mishandled in April.
Goyder told shareholders there will be a reward at “some stage in the future”, after stopping dividend payments.
“Clearly it was disappointing for us not to proceed with a dividend payment, but we were at that stage focused on one thing, that was liquidity,” he said.
“We had to batten down the hatches in every respect to ensure we survived the pandemic.”
Asked why the rosy picture being painted at the AGM was not reflected in the disgruntled wider community, Joyce said: “It will take a while for people to get those bad moments out of their minds.”
