The disgraced former chief executive of Australian flag carrier Qantas, Alan Joyce, has broken his silence to defend his leadership of the airline, nearly three years after he was forced to resign by the board of directors due to a litany of mistakes made during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Following his departure from Qantas in September 2023, it felt like Joyce had gone into hiding. One of Australia’s most well-known corporate faces suddenly disappeared and refused to give media interviews.
So why has Joyce chosen now to ‘set the record’ straight about his time at the airline? Well, he’s just written a memoir, and a featured interview on Australia’s ’60 Minutes’ show would seem like a good way to plug his book.
Joyce has used the memoir to rigorously defend his leadership of Qantas, a role that he had held for 15 years, with another five years at low-cost subsidiary Jetstar before that. He had been planning to retire at just 53 years old, but when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Joyce was asked to stay on to see the airline through the crisis.
“I look back where we were in [20]19, Qantas was at the highest of high, it had the best customer service rankings it ever had, it was making profits, and I was thinking what a great way to sail into the sunset,” Joyce said.
“COVID knocked us between the eyes, and then it became about survival because at one stage we had 11 weeks of cash left because we would have gone bankrupt. It was the most horrible period I’ve had in my entire career because you’re making horrendous decisions to make sure the airline survived.”
Qantas’ fight for survival led to some questionable decisions that have haunted the airline to this day.
- The airline illegally sacked hundreds of ground workers and baggage employees so that it could employ cheaper contractors to do the same job.
- It took government cash to keep employees in a job, and then it made thousands of workers redundant anyway.
- Customers were allowed to book flights that had already been cancelled days, and in some cases, weeks before.
- The airline shrank its workforce so much that performance seriously deteriorated.
“I think we made mistakes, and I think we got things wrong, and I’d be the first to admit that,” Joyce said, but then added: “I think Qantas is in survival now because we got more things right than we got wrong.”
Joyce says the airline was convinced that its decision to sack the ground workers was legal, but claims there was “opportunity for us to make documented decisions.”
He does, however, also say that as the CEO, he takes “ultimate responsibility and accountability for what happened in the business.”
The message that comes across is this: Yes, I made mistakes, but if Qantas hadn’t made these decisions, the airline would have gone bankrupt.
When Joyce resigned from Qantas, he left with a bumper $21.4 million bonus, but a year later, the board of directors said it was clawing back $9.26 million of that pay award, accusing Joyce of making a series of mistakes that resulted in “significant reputational and customer service issues”.
When I saw the headline I thought that outside of Ryanair’s CEO, no one deserves a flogging like Joyce. Much to my dismay I learned that it’s a turn of phrase.