‘I know I’m a polarising figure’: Alan Joyce on Qantas, reputational collapse and his legacy
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I think it's one of the best, if not the best, aviation job in the world, and I'm very honoured that the Qantas board has selected me for that role.
Alan Joyce was once one of Australia's most admired business leaders. But by the time he left Qantas, he had become one of the country's most hated men.
$3.8 million. That is the eye-watering amount former Qantas chief Alan Joyce will receive in his final payout from the airline. The bonus, in the form of surging shares, comes two years after a string of incidents steeped the airline into reputational crisis, leading to his high-profile departure.
His final years at the airline were marked by illegal sackings, cancelled flights, withheld refunds and a collapse in public trust.
Qantas has lost its appeal in the High Court over the illegal sacking of about 1,700 workers during the pandemic. Qantas has been fined $250,000 and convicted for illegally standing down a worker during the pandemic after he raised concerns about the risk of COVID-19 to staff cleaning aircraft from China. But in a new memoir, Joyce defends many of his decisions that made him a symbol of corporate arrogance and distrust.
I'm Daniel James, and you're listening to 7am.
Why did Alan Joyce write Riding the Jet Stream and what does he want Australians to understand about him?
7am. Today, former Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce and what he believes Australians got wrong about him and whether he accepts responsibility for the damage done on his watch. It's Monday, July 27th. Alan, you spent 15 years running Qantas and left amid extraordinary public backlash that you were largely unable to respond to. So why did you feel the need to write this book? And what is it that Australians have most misunderstood about you?
Well, Daniel, the book, I wanted to write the book for some time. You know, as you read in the book, it's got full of my entire family history, my entire life about being a gay man and coming out as gay. It talks about all of the early days of Qantas, some of the high tension issues like the QF32. And then it goes into the period, the last couple of years of the COVID period and what happened then. I talked about it from my perspective, what happened, put the facts down and explain the conditions and the background. People may not agree with me still. I know that. I know I'm a polarizing figure, but it was also put my side of that story and explain how we made our decisions from my perspective.
Okay, so if we go to those last couple of years, and we talk about COVID in particular, because from a public perspective, that's where things really sort of went off the rails. During COVID, Qantas illegally sacked 1,820 ground workers. The High Court ultimately found that Qantas acted unlawfully and that the company has since faced $120 million in compensation and a $90 million penalty. In the book, you still describe outsourcing those jobs as the right call. Why?
I do say that when you look back to the period when the decision was made in 2020, we were staring at potentially the company going bankrupt. We had to make a whole series of decisions to make actually up to 10,000 people redundant. I think around the world in aviation or aviation related jobs, over 2 million people were made redundant. It was the worst period in our history. And we were fighting for survival. And I had, I explained in the book, I had friends, like nearly 25% of management went. I had people I worked with for 20 years that were made redundant. I was in tears.
How does Joyce explain the decision to outsource and sack thousands of Qantas workers during COVID?
They were in tears. It was horrendous. And we did everything with that intent to save the company. Now, I recognize that those 1,800 workers, that was an illegal action. It was found to be against the law. But at the time in the book, I explained when we made the call, nobody thought it was going to be illegal. The legal advice we had was that it wasn't going to be. It went to the board. It went to me. It went to the entire management team. Everybody thought we needed to do it. It wasn't something that we thought we wanted to do. None of this was. I say how heartbreaking it was because just six, seven months before that, Baltus was hiring a massive amount of people.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–1:23
2
Why did Alan Joyce write Riding the Jet Stream and what does he want Australians to understand about him?
1:23–3:50
3
How does Joyce explain the decision to outsource and sack thousands of Qantas workers during COVID?
3:50–5:56
4
Did Qantas rely on incorrect assumptions about travel recovery when making redundancy calls?
5:56–9:35
5
Why did Qantas issue flight credits instead of refunds and how does Joyce justify that choice?
9:35–16:02
6
What happened in the ghost flights controversy and how does Joyce defend Qantas' actions?
16:02–18:27
7
Is the Qantas Chairman's Lounge used to buy political favours or simply build relationships?
18:27–18:37
Speakers
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