Qantas & Union ordered back to work

Airlines can do anything they want ;)

Hey, they had to do something, i guess its just showing the unions that the airlines do not have deep pockets like that. Shows that the airline is not just there to give out money to the employees.

Holding the passengers hostage is never acceptable. The tribunal's terms -- work it out in 3 weeks, or face binding arbitration by a neutral, objective third party -- sound fair enough to me.

At best this is likely to be a temporary truce for both unions and management, at least on the international side. They lost $200 million on that segment last year and have a lot of lower cost but high quality competition. Their prices are much higher than the Chinese airlines, moderately higher than the rest of Asia and slightly higher to North America. Without major cost improvement, look for them to keep their A380s to North America plus Hong Kong and Singapore flights to keep their One World obligations, but dump the rest. The current business plan will not work.