Qantas Airways to cut 100 senior jobs

Qantas Airways to scrap 100 senior executive posts in a bid to tackle the tough times.

Qantas Airways, the national airline of Australia and the country’s largest carrier, will cut 100 senior executive jobs as a apart of its efforts to deal with the fall in demand for air travel worldwide.

A reorganisation of the airline’s management would be carried out in the next few weeks, an official of Qantas Airways was quoted as telling Australia’s leading business Newspaper The Australian Financial Review.
Qantas Airways planned to cut positions from the “upper layers of management,” the official added, following a review of the carrier’s business conducted by consultants Boston Consulting Group.

Many executives in key positions have already left Qantas Airways, including David Cox, head of the engineering department, and Peter Gregg, chief financial officer.

Alan Joyce became chief executive of Qantas in November 2008 after he served as the chief executive of Jetstar, the low-cost subsidiary of Qantas Airways.

In 2008, Qantas Airways had announced that it would do away with as many as 1,500 jobs across the airline, or around 4% of its total workforce.

However, The Australian Financial Review did not mention whether the airline’s intention to eliminate 100 senior executive jobs would be in addition to the earlier plan to scrap 1,500 jobs.

Airlines across the world are striving to cope with the drop in demand for air travel as a result of the global economic recession.

The Australian newspaper Sydney Morning Herald quoted an aviation analyst as commenting that Qantas Airways was “overstaffed in its senior executive ranks” in contrast to Virgin Blue, the Australia-based budget carrier, which has few executives at its top.

The analyst told the Sydney Morning Herald: “Virgin Blue, for example, has a chief executive and a chief financial officer, et cetera. What has Qantas got? They have got a chief executive, a chief financial officer, a treasurer, a couple of people in investor relations, a few in media relations, then there is government relations, and so on.”

However, the news agency Australian Associated Press (AAP) reported that a spokesman of Qantas Airways refused to react to the report in the Sydney Morning Herald on abolishing 100 senior executive jobs, saying: “We are not commenting at this stage.”