Qantas to offer staff one-off bonus

The bonus payment will be made to all Qantas, Jetstar and Qantas group employees whose collective agreements included an 18-month wage freeze, Qantas said on Friday. The payment, worth five per cent of their base annual salary, would be made after the company handed down its 2014/15 full year results on August 20 and be booked in its 2015/16 financial accounts.

Those staff who have yet to finalise a new enterprise bargaining agreement will also be eligible for the bonus should their new agreement include an 18-month wage freeze.

Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce said the airline group’s staff had made a big contribution to improving the company’s long-term competitive position and in delivering on the three-year cost reduction transformation plan.

“The rapid turnaround of the Qantas Group has only been made possible through the dedication and hard work of all our people,” Joyce said in a statement.

“Our ability to make these bonus payments reflects a bright future for the Qantas Group, provided we stay focussed on fully delivering the transformation program that has brought us this far.”

The three-year transformation plan has targeted $2 billion of savings by 2016/17. Qantas said it expected to have achieved $875 million in savings by the end of 2014/15. The forecast was unchanged from the airline’s investor day in May.

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Up to 28,000 Qantas staff were eligible for the bonus, which does not cover those employees on management bonus schemes.

The airline group is expected to announce a bumper full year net profit when it hands down its 2014/15 financial results in August, with market consensus sitting somewhere north of $600 million as the airline group benefitted from lower fuel prices, a more benign domestic market and slower capacity growth on international routes into and out of Australia.