HELICOPTER Pilot Council

CHC Offshore bargaining meetings have taken place regularly since February, although the agreement to start bargaining was reached in November 2022 when the parties exchanged their bargaining agendas.

Unfortunately, the bargaining agenda of the company is so ambitious it is unrealistic to the point of fanciful. It seeks to replace longstanding agreements around established work practices, rostering, travel arrangements (to simulator), removing maximum daily hours (currently 12) with a flawed and non-compliant Fatigue Risk Management System (FRMS).

In terms of remuneration the company now seeks to force wages further below the inflation rate, such that in real terms wage growth is in the negative.

The pilots’ agenda is to keep pace with inflation, seeking in terms of wages a continuation of CPI, what employers everywhere insisted on when CPI was below 2%. Suddenly, CPI is not so attractive to employers.

The company’s attempts to force in the changes it seeks around the 12 hours, unilateral removal of work practices and the imposition of its broken FRMS has simply meant we have been consumed with dispute after dispute as we manage the bargaining process.

This has forced, right in the middle of bargaining, the AFAP to notify disputes to the Fair Work Commission (FWC) to have the company pull back on its forced changes and to reinstate the status quo.

Stunningly, CHC Offshore disingenuously suggested that, after more than 30 years, it did not know it operated an offshore oil-and-gas two (multi) pilot operation.

This was the reason given for trying to abolish the 12-hour maximum rostering period. Fortunately, not even the new CHC Director could tolerate that argument and stepped in to restore good sense (although only after the AFAP lodged each of those disputes with FWC).

As a result, and after more than five months of bargaining, the AFAP has now made an application for a Protected Action Ballot Order (PABO) which the company has not approved. Under the new industrial relations laws, where the union makes an application for a PABO, the parties must now participate in a FWCconvened conciliation conference to try and reach agreement, or at least narrow matters not agreed.

Going through this process will be a first for the AFAP and is being explored for the first time by CHC members.

Off-Shore Australia, formerly Babcock Offshore until the acquisition by CHC, has now agreed to bargain following another successful Majority Support Determination application by the AFAP.

While those negotiations are yet to begin, the AFAP and all five representatives are currently reviewing submissions from pilots and comparable offshore agreements, especially CHC Offshore, as we formulate a comprehensive log of claims and bargaining agenda.

The representatives - Andrew Allport, Andrew Cox, David Dixon, Derek O’Neill and Adam Weir - are doing a fantastic job in bringing pilots together and coordinating their claims. We have scheduled a first meeting with the company to establish the bargaining process and to set schedules for further meetings.

Meanwhile, the AFAP has had further success in encouraging another resistant company to negotiate an enterprise (collective) agreement.

Auriga , the other Majority Support Determination application, is further advanced in their bargaining under the leadership of representatives Nathan Ellis, Kelvin Pearce and Ben Stuart. There have been several meetings since March, but with little progress being made beyond a number of the machinery type clauses.

However, it is clear that the scope of the company’s thinking has not progressed beyond its common law contracts, seeking it seems to merely substitute those individual contracts with an EA in the same or largely the same terms.

Importantly, the company has now agreed to meet faceto-face in Brisbane rather than, as previously, the AFAP and representatives from around the country joining online while the company representatives have been sitting together in the Brisbane office.

HNZ/PHI has moved its Asia-Pacific headquarters from New Zealand to Perth, the original home of Helicopters Australia.

After a period of almost five years of extremely respectful and cooperative relationships, the overturning of the previous management structure has been replaced by where conflict is the company’s preferred modus operandi.

PHI has now also lost both the longstanding Karrathabased Rio Tinto contract as well as the MacKay-based Marine Pilot Transfer contract to Auriga. Disputes with PHI are the order of the day ranging from rostering disputes, annual leave disputes, underpayment (casual) disputes, daily travel allowance disputes, and even a dispute about carers leave.

Unless these can be worked as they were under previous management, we are destined to be spending a lot of time in the Fair Work Commission.

Toll is the EA negotiation that keeps on giving. We may have reached an in-principle agreement so that a draft agreement for our consideration may be all that is required.

However, that progress only came after a period of Protected Industrial Action (PIA) which was suspended when it seemed the last of the outstanding matters was resolved.

We are waiting on a full draft for our consideration followed by a vote of the pilot group.

LifeFlight is also negotiating a new EA at glacial speed. Despite meeting with LifeFlight management (and the company's lawyers) on a number of occasions there is likely still a long way to go before a new EA is finalised.

Meanwhile, the pilot group and the AFAP are currently involved in two on-going disputes with the company.

The first relates to the annual pay increase. pilots were to receive from 1 July 2022. However, after not paying any increase in July, the company agreed in October 2022 to back-pay pilots a 2.5% increase.

The problem is Lifeflight had advised the pilot group they are due a 9.1% pay increase from 1 July 2022.

A dispute was filed by the AFAP with the FWC several months ago. We are now waiting further Directions from the FWC as to how the Commissioner intends to progress the matter.

The second Lifeflight dispute relates to how much, and when, pilots are to be paid for any overtime they work. The company acknowledges the relevant clauses in the EA are not clear, and the AFAP agrees.

The current issue though centers on the company's decision several months ago to unilaterally change when it paid overtime, stating that it had since determined that its previous interpretation was incorrect.

The AFAP is holding off filing a dispute with the Commission until the first dispute matter is finalised.