In a staggering betrayal of local workers, Qantas is slashing 850 Australian corporate roles after inking an outsourcing deal with Accenture to shift its office operations overseas.
The first to go is, finance, procurement, HR and marketing staff. The cull is expected to be finished by the middle of next year. This follows earlier job cuts at the Mascot head office.
CEO Vanessa Hudson said it’s “hard news” and she’s “sorry for the uncertainty.”
She claims it’s about efficiency, AI, and bizarrely “investing in our customers, our people and our future.”
The future’s obviously in India.
The same airline that previously told the Australian Services Union there was “no plan to offshore any Australian jobs” is now doing exactly that under a program called Project iQ.
Accenture has more than 84,000 staff in India. Qantas is using them because, in Hudson’s words, “we cannot hire at the pace this work needs.”
High fuel prices are being blamed, before she took a leaf out of Anthony Albanese’s book and also blamed the “war in the Middle East”
Capacity has already been cut. Now Australian workers are being cut too.
The ASU warned this would be a “deep breach of trust with the Australian public who have stuck by this airline.”
That moment has arrived.
I’ll never fly them again.