Quantas Engineers Delay Strike Until January 9th

TravelMole reports that :

An AAP report says that a strike by more than 1,500 Qantas engineers will remain in the wings until the new year, with the airline today offering an olive branch to the technicians’ union.

More than 1,700 aircraft engineers will walk off the job on January 9 in protest against growing casualisation of the workforce and erosion of working conditions.

Almost 90 per cent of members from the Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association (ALAEA) voted for the action following the breakdown of enterprise negotiations with the airline.

As someone who wears blue jeans to work in a Silicon Valley company “casualization” sounds like a good thing, but in Australia casualization means something else entirely:

What is casualisation?

Casualisation has two main meanings. It is often used loosely in the international

literature to refer to the spread of bad conditions of work such as employment

insecurity, irregular hours, intermittent employment, low wages and an absence of

standard employment benefits (eg Basso, 2003). In Australia, it has a slightly

narrower but more solid meaning. Because our labour markets contain a prominent

form of employment that has been given a label of �casual�, casualisation in the

Australian literature usually refers to a process whereby more and more of the

workforce is employed in these �casual� jobs.