Qantas spins ...

Remember Geoff Dixon's failed attempt to sell off Qantas to a weird consortium of asset strippers in the USA? He was expected to pocket around $100 million in the process. No doubt Qantas would today have been just another national carrier to have joined the long list failed airlines of the world as the financial whizz kids picked its bones.

After this patriotic sell-off failed Dixon left the Qantas board but personally chose his successor the mathematical whizz kid and unstoppable sprooker Alan Joyce.

The present anti-union campaign with its rumours of death threats and whatever other mud is hurled at the public via our wonderfully informed and informing media machines. Such spin has it's origins in the Qantas board which would rather offshore the symbol of national pride than negotiate with the workers in good faith as the law requires.

But, as Ian Varrender writes in the Sydney Morning Herald today, the board has one big problem when it comes to spinning their way out of paying Qantas workers a modest wage rise:

The unions have managed to strike at least one serious blow to the credibility of Qantas's hierarchy. Despite the titanic quest to trim costs, Alan Joyce and most of his senior team members were awarded major lifts in salary. Odd timing to say the least.

That's forced Joyce on the defensive. The company spin now is that his pay is 10 per cent lower than for CEOs of companies in the ASX top 50. That's all well and good. But Qantas isn't in the top 50. It's ranked number 60.

The other line is that his salary jump, from $2.92 million last year to $5 million this year, is skewed because a large part of that rise was in share options, and that, unless he performs, he may not receive those shares.

This is also disingenuous. Those share options are, in fact, deferred bonus payments from previous years. Half of them vested in August, so Joyce already would have received them. The other half are priced so that he is almost guaranteed to receive them, leaving him far from being underpaid.