Travellers should be prepared for delays, with more than a thousand ground staff walking off the job at airports.
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00:00Workers were calling for better pay and working conditions as part of this protected industrial
00:07action this morning.
00:08They say they're also fighting for improvements to ground aviation operations, which has been
00:14in the decline for the better part of the last decade, largely due to cost cutting.
00:19Now, a lot of these staff that walked off the job today were part of the Denata Group,
00:23which is a key part of the supply chain for several international and domestic airline
00:28carriers across the country, including Qantas, which contracts out to Denata for Sydney International
00:34Airport's catering services.
00:36It's something that the Transport Workers Union has said have been locked in ongoing
00:41negotiations for the better part of the last year.
00:44Now, today they were calling for improvements and guaranteed 24-hour working weeks for staff,
00:50as well as a guaranteed 6% wage increase for two years, which should be backdated to June
00:561st as of last year.
00:59Of course, 1,000 staff from Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Adelaide airports walked off
01:04the job for a four-hour period this morning.
01:07And we've heard from the National Secretary of the Union, Michael Caine, who says that
01:12workers were really struggling with poor rostering, low working guaranteed hours, as well as the
01:17threat of having contracts pulled due to outsourcing.
01:21We've got 1,000 workers in the Denata operation.
01:24They're the ground workers.
01:25They're the workers that make sure that the belly of the plane's properly packed, weighed
01:29correctly so the pilot can sign off.
01:32It's really important safety function.
01:33They're the ones that make sure our bags get to their destinations correctly.
01:37And we saw during COVID, when we get that recipe wrong, the airports descend into chaos.
01:43These workers, of course, have had a rough ride.
01:46This was the same group of workers who were denied JobKeeper payments during COVID because
01:50they're companies owned by a foreign government.
01:54And they're the same workers, many of them, who were illegally sacked by Alan Joyce.
01:59Travellers, both domestic and internationally, were advised to make sure they were keeping
02:04across their airlines and regularly checking in to see if there were any delays.
02:08As a result of this protected industrial action, thankfully there weren't too many.
02:13But Qantas also issued a statement saying that they did have contingency plans in place
02:18to ensure that operations did run as smoothly as possible throughout the morning.
02:24For more UN videos visit www.un.org