Qantas engineers warn of ‘flight disruptions’ in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane as they walk off job over pay

More than 1,000 Qantas engineers across Australia will walk off the job in industrial action they claim could kick the week off with peak-hour travel chaos, but the airline says it has contingencies in place and is not expecting any disruptions to travel. Flights between 7am and 9am across three timezones on Monday morning are set to be affected in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. The months-long dispute between Qantas management and line maintenance engineers will see the latter strike for two hours. Line maintenance engineers tow and marshal aircraft on the tarmac, as well as run turnaround checks on aircraft on the ground to clear them for takeoff. Qantas engineers started industrial action on Thursday, when engines and components maintenance workers stopped work. The national secretary of the Australian Workers Union, Paul Farrow, said management had “backed them into a corner”. “As a former aircraft engineer myself, I know there is real pride in getting people where they need to go safely,” he said, adding that “there wouldn’t be a single engineer relishing the idea of delaying passengers”. “[But] Qantas management has absolutely smashed morale among engineers, and now we’ve reached a real fork in the road. Engineers won’t accept seeing their wages lurch backward in real terms while executives get showered in cash.” Last month, the Qantas board cut former CE Alan Joyce’s final pay packet by $9.26m reducing his final $21.4m in total earnings for 2022-23 by nearly half. Qantas engineers are represented by a union alliance comprising the AMWU, the AWU, and the ETU. The workers have been in negotiations since April, as their enterprise agreement expired at the end of June.<br/>