The Political Economy and Skills of Aircraft Maintenance in Australia: Towards
a Research Agenda
Paper Prepared for the International Labour Process Conference, 15-17 March
2010, Rutgers University, New York
Ian Hampson,1 Anne Junor and Sarah Gregson
Industrial Relations Research Centre, and
Australian School of Business
University of New South Wales,
Sydney, NSW 2052,
Australia
ABSTRACT
Licensed Aircraft Maintenance Engineers (or LAMEs, [pronounced lay-mees] in Australian parlance)
check and certify that the planes we fly in are safe to leave the ground. According to international
regulation, a civil passenger plane cannot ‘return to service’ after maintenance unless a LAME ‘signs
off’ that the work has been done to the requisite standard. This puts LAMEs in the middle of the
tension between profits and safety – as the guardian of the latter. Management, professional engineers
and system designers see the ideal LAME labour process as taylorised, driven by adherence to standard
operating procedures specified in manuals and circumscribed by heavy regulation. But LAMEs’ work
is more varied than this, and their skills are both technical and interpersonal: they use both – including
uncodified ‘skills of experience’ – to judge that the work of others is done to the necessary standard.
Airline safety is therefore crucially dependent on LAME skills; on the training and accrediting
institutions that ensure their integrity, and on the industrial relations systems that allow their exercise
and prevent their compromise by cost pressures relayed by management. It is therefore surprising that
the safety implications of the reorganisation and offshoring of maintenance work are so little studied in
labour process circles, and in the emerging literature on deregulation, industrial relations and human
resource management in the airlines. The lack of integration across salient literatures is also a
surprising finding of this exploratory research. This paper canvasses a research agenda to explore the
safety implications of the reorganisation of LAMEs’ work, and their skills and qualifications.
Acknowledgements
We thank the Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association (ALAEA) for various forms of
support for this research, and although we defer listing other supporting organisations and individuals,
we thank them too. We also thank our interviewees for generously giving us their time, and we thank
the Australian School of Business at the University of New South Wales for the support of a Special
Research Grant.
1
Contact: I.Hampson@unsw.edu.au
1
The Political Economy and Skills of Aircraft Maintenance in Australia: Towards
a Research Agenda
Introduction
Aircraft maintenance is little studied in Labour Process circles, although it is a most
interesting labour process indeed. Licensed Aircraft Maintenance Engineers2 (or
LAMEs, [pronounced lay-mees] in Australian parlance) check and certify that the
planes we fly in are safe to leave the ground. According to international regulation, a
civil passenger plane cannot ‘return to service’ after maintenance unless a LAME
‘signs off’ that the work has been done to the requisite standard. This puts LAMEs in
a strategically crucial position industrially, as well as in the middle of the tension
between profits and safety – as the guardian of the latter. LAMEs could be described
as ‘blue collar knowledge workers’ – or, ‘technoservice’ workers (Darr, 2004). Their
skills are both technical and interpersonal: LAMEs use both to judge that the work of
others is done to the necessary standard before signing off on it. Moreover, although
(from the point of view of management, professional engineers and system designers)
the ideal LAME labour process is taylorised, driven by adherence to standard
operating procedures specified in manuals and circumscribed by heavy regulation,
LAMEs often work quite differently. Airline safety is therefore crucially dependent
on LAMEs’ skills and motivation.
It is therefore surprising that airline maintenance is mentioned little in the emerging
international literature on industrial relations and human resource management in the
airlines.3 Recent major contributions (Barrett, 2009), including partial outcomes of
the MIT Airline Industry Project (Belobaba et al, 2009; Bamber et al, 2009; Gittel et
al, 2009) mention airline maintenance if at all, only in passing. Nor is airline
maintenance studied in the more critical academic literature on employment relations
in the airline industry (eg Blyton et al, 2001, 2003; Turnbull et al, 2004; Harvey and
Turnbull, nd; Harvey 2008; O’Sullivan and Gunningle, 2009; Oxenbridge et al, 2010;
Special Issue of International Human Resource Management, 2010). On the other
hand, the ‘human factors’ affecting the safety of airline maintenance are studied
extensively in the discipline of ‘safety science’ (eg see special issue of Ergonomics,
2010), although the transmission of its findings and prescriptions to salient disciplines
is hampered by tensions between ‘systems theory’/ organisational behaviour and
employment relations paradigms.
Our objectives in this paper are exploratory. Overall, we are suggesting a research
agenda – a set of issues around the political economy and skills of aircraft
maintenance – that we believe are both unexamined and worthy of debate in the
international literature, as well as in domestic policy circles. More particularly, we are
exploring controversies around those skills in Australia, as they have been revealed
through a number of interviews, transcribed and analysed, and cross referenced to
2
In other countries, L/AMEs are referred to using different terminology, for example in the US they
are called Aircraft Mechanics, and subject to slightly different regulations. In Australia, LAMEs
supervise the work of AMEs.
3
This notwithstanding that the world market for Aircraft Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul is forecast
to reach $55.2 billion by the year 2015 – see
http://www.Strategyr.com/Aircraft_MRO_Market_Report.asp.
2
salient literatures. We have been struck by the lack of integration across these
literatures, in particular the literature around HRM/employment relations in the
airlines, the safety science and human factors literature(s), and the extensive
literatures concerned with the public regulation of aircraft safety in general and
maintenance in particular; and the international and national academic and
policy/practitioner literature(s) on skill formation.
First we describe the ingredients of the labour process of LAMEs, pointing to the
tensions between conceptualisations of that labour process as taylorised and actual
practice, and we argue these tensions confuse popular prescriptions for employment
relations reform. We also suggest there is present in the labour process of LAMEs a
set of tacit awareness, interpersonal and coordination skills that are only partially
registered in so-called ‘human factors’ training, which is mandatory for aircraft
maintenance. Then section two briefly explicates key foundations of the safety
literature, and argues that the skills of aircraft maintenance are vital to ensure airline
safety. It sketches the co-called ‘safety culture’, which may be undermined by
practice in the airline industry. The third section sketches the deregulation of the
Australian airline industry, arguing that cost cutting and offshoring may well
undermine airline maintenance and safety. This section also identifies the ingredients
of the current contest over skill recognition and certification in Australian training and
licensing institutions.
i) The Work and Skills of LAMEs: A Labour Process Perspective
The LAME labour process is much misunderstood and, as noted above, little studied
in the emerging literature on employment relations in the airlines. As described
above, LAMEs perform aircraft maintenance, along with their unlicensed colleagues
(AMEs), but only LAMEs certify that the maintenance done by AMEs is safe. The
‘release to service’ involves high levels of technical and, as we will suggest,
interpersonal and awareness skills. It involves making judgements about the quality
of work performed by other people, and therefore about their competence and
motivation. It is also an arena where time pressures relayed by management collide
with safety.
The process of maintenance is heavily regulated from the international sphere. The
1944 International Covenant on Civil Aviation, a treaty to which Australia is
signatory, set up the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) in 1947. This
organisation develops standards, which are applied through national organisations – in
Australia’s case the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA).4 The standards which
regulate aircraft maintenance have until quite recently been administered in Europe
and America by the European Civil Aviation Conference (ECAC) and the Federal
Aviation Authority (FAA) – together constituting the JAA (Joint Aviation
Authorities). These standards were known as the Joint Aviation Requirements, or
JAR. From 2003 the European Aviation Safety Authority (EASA) has taken over
their administration within Europe, and increasingly, internationally. The main
standards which contain specifications of maintenance processes and maintenance
skills and training for civil passenger aircraft are threefold. The JAR 66 (or EASA
4
The institutions of international airline regulation are discussed in Belobaba et al, 2009, ch. 2,
although the regulation of aircraft maintenance and its implications are not.
3
66) sets out the requirements for certifying licensed maintenance personnel, in
particular the scope of license ‘privileges’. JAR 145 (or EASA 145), sets out the
requirements which maintenance organisations must meet to fulfil their certifying
duties, in particular the requirement to document procedures for writing, submitting
and keeping records updated. JAR 147 (or EASA 147) sets out the requirements for
issuing approvals to maintenance organisations so they can train AMEs to standards
set under JAR 66. In Australia, these three sets of requirements are known as Civil
Aviation Regulations (CARs), and they are currently undergoing pressures for
‘harmonisation’ as Australian regulators attempt to reshape licensing requirements
towards European Aviation Safety Authority (EASA) requirements
This heavy regulation distinguishes aircraft maintenance work from most other
production or maintenance functions, as Arthur Luby (2005) has pointed out, in one
of the few academic discussions of aircraft maintenance work from an employment
relations point of view. Luby shows how the licensing regimen described above, and
imposed (in America) by the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA), on mechanics who
approve ‘return to service [of] an airframe, or any related part or appliance’, or a
‘powerplant, propeller or any related part or appliance’ (FAA, quoted by Luby,
2005:207) heavily circumscribes the circumstances in which this judgement can be
made. Mechanics ‘performing maintenance, alteration, or preventative maintenance
on an aircraft, engine, propeller or appliance’ are required to ‘use the methods,
techniques, and practices prescribed in the current Manufacturer’s Maintenance
Manual or Instructions for Continued Airworthiness prepared by its manufacturer, or
other methods, techniques, and practices acceptable to the Administrator’ (FAA,
quoted by Luby, 2005:207). The FAA, echoing international regulation, specifies that
a mechanic who departs from the methods prescribed in the manual is subject to
suspension or revocation of his/her license, or fines, or both, even if the work in
question did not cause an accident or incident implicating passenger safety. This
latter requirement is an encouragement to see the labour process of LAMEs as heavily
taylorised, and the job of the LAME as requiring little particular skill apart from
following specified procedures – a view frequently taken by aviation professional
engineers.
As Luby (2005) once again points out, this makes problematic the conventional
‘employee involvement’ view of performance management, propagated more recently
for example by Bamber et al (2009) and Gittell et al (2009). According to this
prescription, if workers are given responsibility and autonomy over a work process,
trusted and appropriately motivated, they will respond (other things being equal) with
commitment, initiative and discretionary effort, and will ‘do whatever is needed to
ensure a successful operation’ in the interests of the company (Bamber et al,
2009:180) – including reorganising the work process. This is problematic because,
first, LAMEs already have considerable autonomy, as evident in their legal
responsibility for work on which they sign off (Luby, 2005:207), and second, this
autonomy is on the other hand limited by the requirement to adhere to procedure, on
pain of losing one’s license, and even criminal sanctions including imprisonment.
This is an unusual labour process – in aircraft maintenance, it is said, ‘the
manufacturers’ manual is law’, and aircraft maintenance is heavily procedure-driven
and dependent on doing things ‘the correct way’ for obvious reasons. Yet
notwithstanding heavy penalties, divergences from procedure – erroneous or
4
deliberate – are relatively common (Hobbs, 2004:4; 2008:12-25, passim; Reason,
1997:49-54). A European study reported in 2000 that 34% of maintenance workers
acknowledged their most recent task had been performed in a manner that
contravened the formal procedures (quoted in Hobbs, 2008:15). An Australian survey
of L/AMEs found that 30% reported having signed off on a task before it was
completed, and 90% reported having done a task without the correct tools or
equipment (Hobbs, 2004; 2008:15).
What is the significance of departures from procedure? There is a large literature on
the ‘human factors’ involved in safety ‘occurrences’, in highly technological
industries, including aircraft maintenance (eg see the Special Issue of Ergonomics,
2010). Yet this literature is somewhat ‘siloed’ from the literature on high
performance work systems, in part, we surmise, because of the way ‘departure from
procedure’ is conceptualised. For example, the Human Factors Analysis and
Classification System (HFACS), developed by James Reason (eg 1990; 1997) and in
use in the US military among other places (Weigmann and Shappel, 2001; Latorella
and Prabhu, 2000:136) defines departures from procedure, or ‘willfull disregard for
the rules and regulations’, in pejorative language, as violations (Wiegmann and
Shappel, 2001:1009-10). For Reason, there are two types of violations; routine and
exceptional. Exceptional ones are ‘isolated departures from authority, neither typical
of the individual, nor condoned by management’; routine ones involve ‘bending the
rules’, they tend to be habitual and are often enabled by a system of supervision and
management that tolerates them.
This conceptual framework fails to distinguish a violation from an innovation, of the
time-saving sort lauded for example in the concept of lean production and in the High
Peformance Work Systems literature. If departures from procedure are by definition
violations, so are innovations. Thus Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority has identified
as a ‘human factors’ problem itself the ‘dual standards so prevalent in the industry,
whereby engineers and technicians are trained to follow procedures on the one hand,
and yet sometimes unofficially encouraged to violate procedures in order to get the
job done’ (CAA, 2003:3-4). Whether divergence from procedure is a ‘violation’ or an
‘error’ is a moot point: much depends on the outcome, although even this connection
is not as clear as it seems, since work which violates procedure may uncover a hazard
and prevent a problem, while work which conforms to procedure may not. The key
point to which we wish to draw attention is that the outcomes of work are heavily
dependent on the skills and motivations of the aircraft engineers and LAMEs, who are
not trained monkeys following standard operating procedures, but are called upon
frequently to fill gaps in documentation, and to make high level and rapid safety
critical judgements.
In his research, Hobbs found that departures from procedure may be due to badly
written and unclear documentation, or to the fact that there may be an easier or
quicker way to do the job than that specified in the manual (Hobbs, 2008:18). Such
departures from procedure may be defined, for instance by Brown and Duguid (1991)
as innovations, and as underscoring the inherent difficulties of ‘canonical’ workplace
documentation. Hobbs also finds that the most cited reason for departing from
procedure is ‘management pressure’ and ‘the cultural or value systems that permeate
the organisation’ (Hobbs, 2008:27). Our interviewees have reported that the
performance bonuses of managers, who often are not technically qualified, depend
5
crucially on ‘on time’ departures (also see Gittell et al, 2009:303). Any flight delay is
very costly to the airline, and in the normal course of performance management will
be traced to its source, and that person or department will be blamed and penalised.
Thus managers may pressure LAMEs to ‘sign off’ on work that may not have been
done to the LAME’s satisfaction. When this occurs, the professional LAME may, in
the words of one interviewee, tell the manager to ‘go and get stuffed’ or may
capitulate to one of a number of informal pressures the manager may bring to bear.5
These informal pressures include the possibility of losing access to further training
and gaining more licenses, directly linked to LAME remuneration – or, if (as has been
reported to us) the LAME is on a temporary work visa (in Australia called a s457
visa), the implied sanction of withdrawal of employer support and consequent
repatriation.
The outcome of the deviation from procedure may be catastrophic, or it may be
benign, and the link between a deviation from procedure, and a catastrophic outcome,
is not always clear and/or direct. The literature on safety distinquishes between
‘active’ failures (where the consequences of a human error are immediately felt) and a
‘latent’ error, where the consequences may not be immediately apparent (eg Reason,
1990; 1997). Moreover, errors may link up in ‘chains’, giving rise to ‘sneak path
incidents’. As Vogt et al (2010:151 put it ‘most of the time things go right, but
occasionally, and inevitably, an unforseen combination of the same trade offs between
thoroughness and efficiency results in critical incidents.’ As some safety gurus put it,
usually ‘Murphy’s law’ does not apply – usually people get away with questionable
practice. But not always.
It seems to follow that ‘safe’ is not a label which can be easily and unproblematically
assigned to a particular practice – there is something of the ‘social construction’ about
it. It is yet another ‘essentially contested’ notion, we would suggest, like ‘class’,
‘power’ – and, indeed, ‘skill’ itself. This ‘essential contest’ is part of ‘normal’
employment relations practice. Latorella and Prabhu (2000: 134) argue that ‘human
error is a pejorative term for normal human behaviour in often unkind environments,
where only the outcome determines if this behaviour is deleterious’. Experienced
LAMEs, like other workers, may develop routines and workarounds that save them
time – notwithstanding that some will be illegal – whatever their consequences for
safety. As in other work processes, management will seek to appropriate and
institutionalise these time-saving innovations (including the illegal ones), and workers
will resist. In this contest over work time and effort, the rhetoric of ‘safety’ is
powerful. And since, as we have suggested, departure from procedure is relatively
commonplace, to ensure safety, what is needed is the judgement capacity, formed
through good training and workplace experience, to tell benign deviations from
malign ones. Thus when deviations from procedure occur, much depends on the
expertise, the skill and knowledge, and the judgement of the individual LAME.
Skill, and the rhetoric and reality of safety, sustains the ‘indeterminacy of labour’ in
the LAME labour process. A LAME may know that a departure from procedure is
benign, yet adhere to procedure to shelter from work intensification (‘work to rule’).
Equally a LAME may know better than a non-technically trained manager that
5
As Alan Hobbs (2008), has argued, this introduces a number of unique sources of stress, as the
consequences of maintenance lapses may lie dormant for years before bearing bitter fruit – and an
inquisition as to the source of the error.
6
adhering to procedure may be more or less safe than deviating slightly. A similar
situation occurs when the LAME is not happy with work performed by someone else,
and has to ask them to rework it – perhaps for genuine reasons, or perhaps
vexatiously. This can be an unpleasant conversation, since there may be a genuine
disagreement between two qualified experts over the safety of a particular procedure.
Clearly, a number of interpersonal and other skills, in addition to technical skills, are
required in the LAME labour process. 6
We suggest these skills may be able to be analysed using a methodology developed
for the Service Skills Identification Project for the NZ government (NZ DoL 2009;
Junor and Hampson, 2008; Hampson and Junor, 2010). This project identified three
sets of skills of awareness, interpersonal interaction and coordination, each at five
levels of expertise that were exercised in service sector work processes. We expect
these skills would be necessary for the LAME labour process. In a later iteration of
the research, we have used the phrase ‘skills of experience’ to denote these skills,
recognising their dependence on workplace learning through experience and problem
solving. We note that the ALAEA (2009:21) mentions ‘minimum age’ and ‘maturity’
as reasons to prevent the cutting back of maintenance training, and to resist reforms to
license structures. We hypothesise that experience, minimum age and maturity are
being used as proxies for an as-yet incompletely codified set of skills used in
conjunction with technical skills.
Skills of awareness play a major role in aircraft maintenance. These involve not just
for example visual acuity, but also a sense (developed through workplace learning) of
when, for example, a blemish on a piece of metal indicates a stain, or when it
indicates an underlying fracture. They involve judging when further reworking will
weaken a strong but untidy looking repair. Visual awareness skills also include the
ability to go beyond the itemised checking-off of elements of an airframe or part of an
avionics system to the more holistic apprehension of risk in a configuration of
elements. Equally, skills of interpersonal awareness play a role in ascertaining
whether an AME is ‘on the ball’, or whether their work can be signed off, or whether
further inspection is required. Skills of boundary management (‘assertiveness’;
‘managing up’) are needed for the conversation in which a manager pressures a
LAME to sign off on work that the LAME is not happy with, and also to require
rework from a colleague. Skills of coordination, time management and the integration
of ‘arcs’ and ‘lines’ of work (Strauss, 1985; Strauss et al, 1985), as well as
interpersonal communication, are needed during ‘changeover’ between shifts. They
are also needed when a manager disrupts so-called ‘continuity of task’, dismembering
a line of work into task fragments to redistribute labour power around multiple lines
of work (to eliminate the ‘white space’ of unutilised labour) thus requiring
reintegration through ‘articulation work’ and ‘work process knowledge’ (Strauss et al,
1985; Boreham et al, 2002).
Many of these as yet incompletely codified skills are the objects of ‘human factors’
training. This training arose from investigations into aircraft accidents, in an attempt
One attempt to document the skills of LAMEs is the Federal Government’s Job Outlook, which in
turn draws on the US Government’s O*Net database of occupations and their knowledge, skills and
abilities (see http://joboutlook.gov.au/pages/occupation.aspx?code=3231&search=&Tab=skills).
O*Net weighs the importance of ‘face to face discussions’ (95%) almost as highly as ‘being exact and
accurate’ (96%).
6
7
to identify the ‘human factors’ – rather than the technical ones – that caused them.
The investigations found that many accidents were caused by failures of
communication and awareness among flight crews. The traditional authority structure
on flight decks, based on the unchallengeable power of the captain – was itself a
problem if/when subordinates possessed information which might have prevented an
accident had the captain been appraised of it, yet because the captain is akin to God,
he would not listen. So the ‘first wave’ of human factors training was aimed at flight
crews, and was known as Crew Resource Management (CRM) training. It aimed to
inculcate skills of teamwork, situational awareness, assertiveness (‘it is very important
that you listen to me’) among other things.
Accident investigation went through a similar process with aircraft maintenance, and
since 2000, Human Factors training has been mandatory for aircraft maintenance
engineers as part of JAR 66 (CAA 2002 a, b). This change was signalled in the US by
a US Department of Transportation and Federal Aviation Administration Advisory
Circular of September 2000 (FAA 2000). The new training was to support
‘maintenance resource management’, or ‘a general process of maintaining an effective
level of communication and safety in maintenance operations’ (p. 3). It was to focus
on situational awareness – both individual and team – communication skills,
teamwork, task allocation and decision making. The most common ‘human factors’
causing maintenance error were named the ‘dirty dozen’: lack of communication,
complacency, lack of knowledge, distraction, lack of teamwork, fatigue, lack of
resources, pressure, lack of assertiveness, stress, lack of awareness, norms (FAA
2000:2). Particular attention was to be given to the ‘ability to verbalise a series of
“rights” that belong to every employee… [including] … the right to say no, the right
to express feelings and ideas, and the right to ask for information’ (FAA, 2000:1).
The desirable organisational end point is the ‘safety culture’ – ‘a pervasive,
organization-wide attitude placing safety as the primary priority driving the way
employees perform their task’ (FAA 2000:3). From a labour process perspective, the
‘safety culture’ prescriptions are saturated with unitarist assumptions, and the
dynamics of safety at the workplace need a more comprehensive conceptual
framework to apprehend them.
ii) Airline Safety and Aircraft Maintenance
To summarise thus far: we have established that the LAME labour process is heavily
shaped by the extent and nature of regulation within which it is embedded –
regulation which gives ‘safety’ a powerful rhetorical force. Yet departures from
procedure are, if not routine, then frequent enough. Moreover, the literature on
workplace innovation and learning tells us that canonical accounts of workplace
practice – like the manuals from which LAMEs work – are sometimes incomplete,
requiring expertise to fill in the gaps. In airline maintenance, this expertise is safety
critical, yet often its exercise is impeded by the management systems and pressures
within which the work process takes place. One sign of the lack of integration
between the ‘safety science’ and employment relations literatures is that the former
tends to concentrate on formulating a clear set of requirements without concessions to
commercial and industrial relations pressures. Further signs are the tendency in the
HRM literature to consider human factors within a ‘business case’ framework, and a
failure to discuss the safety implications of ‘High Performance Work Systems’
prescriptions for the LAME labour process. This section establishes the importance of
8
maintenance for air safety, and reviews the organisational prescriptions from an
employment relations perspective.
Poor maintenance is a leading cause of accidents and fatalities (Hobbs, 2008: 1),
although it’s exact contribution is probably impossible to quantify. Various estimates
of the incidence of ‘hull loss accidents’ traceable to maintenance errors are quoted by
Boeing – 4% according to Hobbs (2004:2), and 16% according to Latorella and
Prabhu (2000:142). The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB, 2006:1) claims
that 12% of major accidents are due to maintenance errors. Harris and Neville
(2010:146) quote Rankin’s (1997) estimate that improper maintenance contributed to
15% of all commercial jet accidents. The latter is also a leading cause of flight
delays, in turn a large cost factor for airlines. Latorella and Prabhu (2000:144) quote
an estimate by Gregory that 50% of engine-related flight delays and cancellations are
due to improper maintenance, and the number of delays in aircraft availability, gate
returns, in flight shutdowns, diversions to alternative airports etc must also be costed
in. This figure would be considerable, whatever it was.
As Latorella and Prabhu (2000:143) argue, the relative rarity of accidents does not
mean that maintenance errors are rare. Accidents typically result from a combination
of causal factors and must overcome several lines of defense. This notion of
successive defenses against error is derived from the work of James Reason, and it
underpins the prevailing perspective on safety in the airline industry, as well as
elsewhere (eg 1990, 1997; Reason and Hobbs, 2003; eg see CAA 2002 a, b; FAA
2000:7). On this conception, defences against catastrophe are to be conceived as
layers, or walls, in which each wall provides protection lest the one in front be
breached. However, the ‘walls’ are like layers of ‘swiss cheese’, with the holes
representing breaches in the defences (see CAA, 2002a: ch. 8). When the holes ‘line
up’ an ‘accident trajectory’ may be permitted, in which hazards penetrate the
defences, and a disaster occurs.
For Reason, safety is a ‘dynamic non-event’: the outcomes of good safety procedures
are smooth operating and an absence of disasters or ‘safety occurrences’. But the
absence of a disaster does not mean systems are ‘safe’. During a long period without
an accident, safety is certain to be eroded, as cost cutting makes inroads into safety
defenses (Reason, 1997:6), and it may be just then that the likelihood of catastrophe is
greatest. As Reason puts it, safety is the outcome of the tension between the twin
functions of protection and production (or the quest for profits). And, as Wiegman
and Shappell, (2001:1011) argue
In general, corporate decisions about how such resources should be managed
centre around two distinct objectives: safety, and on-time, cost-effective
operations. In times of prosperity, both objectives can be easily balanced and
satisfied in full. However, there may be times of fiscal austerity which demand
some give and take between the two. Unfortunately, history tells us that safety
is often the loser in such battles as safety and training are often the first to be
cut in organisations having financial difficulties.
This may apply widely, as increased competition in the airline industry forces cost
cutting, and gives rise to what the Reason model calls latent, organisational factors
that underlie an individual’s mistakes. These often arise from top-level decisions
9
made by managers and regulators, systems designers, and governments. They lie
dormant within an organisation like pathogens, ready to combine with local
conditions and produce a catastrophe (Reason, 1997:10). Germane examples of such
latent factors include inadequate training and reductions in the time available for
maintenance work processes.
Reason proposes that the way to becoming a ‘high reliability’ organisation – a safe
one – is by developing a ‘safety culture’. Reason’s ‘take’ on ‘culture’ could lead us
into well-worn debates in human resource management literature – he approvingly
cites Peters and Waterman, (1982) indicating that his perspective on culture leans
toward the unitarist which, by definition, fails to give proper weight to industrial
relations processes. For example, he does not take explicit account of the positive
role unions may play in ensuring safety. Elements of Reason’s safety culture include
the ‘informed culture’, which values and propagates knowledge of the system as a
whole, the ‘reporting culture’, in which people are encouraged to report their near
misses and safety violations, the ‘just culture’, in which people are not blamed
(sometimes called the ‘no blame’ culture) for error (except in cases of sabotage or
criminal negligence), and a ‘flexible culture’, which delegates decision making
powers to expertise in moments of crisis (or near crisis) (Reason, 1997:195ff). We
would argue that commercial considerations – and performance management systems
– are in tension with Reason’s prescriptions for the ‘high reliability’ organisation.
This is an important issue to research, in the context of airline deregulation, and
increased competition in the airline industry, issues which are dismissed far too
peremptorily in our opinion in the recent literature.
For example, Belobaba et al (2009, 5-6) assert that ‘despite worries at the time of
deregulation that competitive cost pressures might lead to reduced maintenance
standards, there is no statistical evidence that airline safety has deteriorated’. As
discussed above, the fact that there has not been an increase in airline ‘safety
incidents’ – and it is by no means sure that this is the case for Australia – means little
in terms of safety – it may instead be the case that safety defenses are eroding under
cost pressures and an accident may well be imminent. In fact, accident rates per
100,000 hours flown in transport and general aviation have recently taken a slight
upturn after a long period of decline (see ATSB 2009:12). On the other hand,
Belobaba et al (2009: 319) claim that there may be an inverse relationship between
‘low level’ incidents and serious ones, such that low level ones may raise awareness,
preventing more serious ones. An argument of this nature is somewhat metaphysical
in the sense Karl Popper identified – it cannot be resolved by evidence, or it is
difficult to say what sort of evidence would resolve it.
Without irony, Belobaba et al, (2009:313) tell us ‘a textbook about commercial
aviation would be gravely deficient if it did not include a discussion of safety issues’.
Yet the book barely mentions aircraft maintenance, instead insisting that the topic is
too large for their book, and asserting that ‘jet travel has consistently become safer
decade by decade’ (p. 319). The chapter confines itself to rectifying statistical
oddities in the measurement of safety, and disccusing airline security against
terrorism. However it does assert that some airlines are safer than others, in fact by a
factor of 5, although it does not inquire into the reasons why. On this issue, however,
Herrera and Vasigh (2009:128) observe that, given the global nature of aviation and
of transnational regulation, one would expect little or no difference in safety rates –
10
but this is far from what is the case. They find that North America is the safest region,
and Africa and the Middle East are much less so, and they concede that this may be
because ‘safety standards or oversight are not as high in these areas of the world’.
Some airlines also tend to use older aircraft, which require more frequent and more
highly skilled maintenance. There is an extensive literature, as one would expect, on
airline safety in general, and airline maintenance in particular – it is just not well
integrated with the emerging literature on employment relations in the airlines.
There are signs that the ‘human factors’ literature is reaching out beyond its hitherto
self-imposed limitations. In the introduction to a recent special issue of Ergonomics,
on the topic of Human Factors, Harris and Neville (2010:146-7) make the following
remarks. They claim that human factors as a discipline has come of age. In its
accumulation of expertise in its applied science base, drawing from experimental and
social psychology, engineering, and so on, it has tended to become somewhat
fragmented ‘while increasing levels of specialisation served to develop the science, it
has also often mitigated against its coherent application’. It is now time to ‘examine
the contribution of ergonomics in a wider, business context, where it is acknowledged
and accepted that safety is not the only goal’, since ‘commercial organisations …
[including] … maintenance organisations, are required to balance the requirement for
safety against both cost and performance considerations’. Elsewhere, in the same
issue, Vogt et al (2010) argue that human factors should shift from ‘mere error
management to an existential part of core business and, accordingly, to provide
measurement and management tools’. This ‘servants of capital’ approach may not be
well suited to grappling with an understanding of the cost pressures on the labour
process of aviation maintenance. Indeed, as we will see in the next section, the
pressures shaping decisions about aircraft maintenance – including whether to
outsource or not – are not entirely economic, much less prioritising of safety, but are
embedded in the cut and thrust of industrial relations processes.
iii) The Political Economy of the Airline Industry in Australia: Deregulation
Reform and the Safety of Maintenance Practices
The international literature on the airline industry has well documented the process of
deregulation and some of its effects, both actual and potential (eg Belobaba, et al,
2009; Barrett, 2009; Blyton et al, 2001, 2003, Turnbull et al, 2004; O’Sullivan and
Gunningle, 2009; Harvey and Turnbull, nd; Small, 2002). The deregulatory process
has removed the cushion of government protection. It has reduced both the cost of
fares and profits, and has given rise to greater price and schedule competition between
existing airlines and ‘new entrants’/‘low cost carriers’ offering fewer ‘extras’ to
customers and a ‘brave new workplace’ to many employees (Peetz, 2006). The
effects on airline safety have yet to be incorporated into the literature on airline
deregulation and industrial relations.7 Management pressure at the ‘release to
service’ stage might erode flying safety – if management (potentially technically
inexpert) is able to pressure LAMEs to sign off against their better judgement. This
contradicts one of Reason’s foundations for a safety culture – that when crucial
decisions like this are to be made, expertise should hold sway over commercial or
7
This is not to downplay the enormous literature on safety science and human factors. It is only a
claim that the literature on airline deregulation and industrial relations has not drawn sufficiently on
this literature, and incorporated its findings.
11
other pressure. Support for the LAME in this position – from external regulation or a
union – is crucial for safety. While external regulation can obviously help in many
ways, there appears to us to be no substitute for day to day employee representation
on the shop floor as a bulwark against vengeful management, and, indeed, as an
integral component of Reason’s ‘reporting culture’.
In this way, the problematics of airline safety and employee representation are
intertwined. The critical literature on deregulation and industrial relations in the
airlines notes that contesting union representation is an all too frequent management
strategy,8 although the implications for aircraft maintenance and safety have not been
explored. A crucial aspect of the industrial relations environment in Australia is the
possibility of outsourcing, and/or offshoring aircraft maintenance. The decision to
offshore cannot be seen from a purely economic perspective, but has to be seen as part
of the cut and thrust of industrial relations processes – as a powerful employer lever,
which may, however, have unwelcome implications for safety. In particular, the
constant threat of offshoring by the major Australian airlines has contributed to an
increasingly hostile industrial environment where local unions have been pressed to
make concessions in enterprise bargaining on wages, hours, staffing and training that
may herald worsening safety outcomes.
In this section we trace these themes through the recent political economy of the
airline industry in Australia. This exploration necessarily takes in the reshaping of the
institutions and practices that recognise and accredit the skills of LAMEs. This is
because the training and licensing procedures which deliver and accredit those skills
are also crucial components of a safe national aviation system – as is an industrial
relations environment that enables their safe and effective exercise. Despite the all
too prevalent assumption that industrial conflict is always negative (eg Gittell et al
2009:275-281), we argue that in the case of LAMEs, successful industrial action may
result in increased workplace and passenger safety and contribute to organisational
sustainability by forcing management to acknowledge the risks involved in purely
financially motivated rationalisation. Nor should these authors’ argument that short
contract negotiation periods suggest good union/management relations be accepted
unquestioningly. Instead, the speedy conclusion of agreements may reflect the
existence of weak union representation that is unable to maintain/improve workplace
conditions and safety standards.
Deregulation and Industrial Relations in Australian Airlines
The process of airline deregulation and privatisation gathered pace in Australia in the
late 1980s, in the face of increasing international competition. In October 1990, the
government terminated its ‘two airline’ policy which had guaranteed Australian
8
Gittel et al (2009) and Bamber et al (2009) identify two forms of relation between management and
employees: control and commitment (the terms are pretty well self explanatory). They cross-reference
these to three forms of relation to unions: accommodation, avoidance and partnership (see Bamber et al
170). While they favour a commitment/partnership model (Southwest), they acknowledge that some
airlines have achieved success through avoidance and control (Ryanair). We suggest that the
conceptual equipment is a little too blunt to register the Qantas industrial relations. For one thing,
Qantas seemed to use different strategies for different unions, and for another any shift from
accommodative to avoidance, was not successful.
12
Airlines and Ansett duopolistic control of domestic routes and, Qantas operation of
international routes. Corporate restructuring followed, as Qantas purchased
Australian Airlines in 1992 and British Airways bought a 25 per cent share of Qantas
in 1993, while the remaining 75 per cent of shares were offered for public sale in
1995. Qantas was able to ply domestic routes but lost its status as Australia’s sole
international airline. It also faced competition from privately-owned Ansett Airlines
and several new entrants to the market, offering budget fares. By 1993, two attempts
to set up Compass had failed but Impulse Airlines, set up in 1992, was more
successful. In 2001, Qantas bought Impulse and made it the basis of its own low-cost
carrier, Jetstar. In 2000 the Branson brand, Virgin Blue, also began to contest
domestic routes, although the Virgin Group’s involvement was reduced when it
became the subject of a hostile takeover by Patrick Corporation which, in turn, was
taken over by Toll Holdings. In an environment of immense flux, Ansett Airlines fell
foul of the national regulator in September 2001 and collapsed, making 16,000
employees redundant.
Through this period, the industrial relations foundations were shifting dramatically.
In the 1980s, industrial relations in Australia had taken place in the context of an
‘Accord’ between unions and government (significantly not including employers), the
central feature of which was wage restraint in a centralised system (Hampson, 1996).
In 1989, a wage claim by pilots ‘outside’ the Accord threatened the latter, and was
broken with government support. From 1990, the Labor government also instituted
more decentralised industrial relations where wages and conditions were increasingly
set at the workplace level. While it argued that national prosperity was contingent on
employers and employees negotiating mutually beneficial enterprise agreements,
unions struggled to operate on myriad fronts at once. Membership haemorrhaged,
industrial activity declined dramatically and resourcing shrivelled. In the wake of the
election of the Liberal (conservative) government in 1996, with its anti-union
Workplace Relations Act, economic rationalist agendas made further headway as the
government was prepared to back any employer prepared to challenge worker
militancy or organisation. Against a backdrop of government ministers asserting
shrilly that individual contracts were the only way to guarantee increased productivity
(see Peetz, 2006:62-70) airline unions at Qantas gave a variety of commitments to
cooperate with workplace change initiatives in return for management’s commitment
to bargain collectively (McDonald and Millett, 2001).
As detailed by Small (2002:34-5) what became known as a ‘survival package’ deal
was struck between Qantas management, the Australian Council of Trade Unions and
sixteen unions representing Qantas employees. Against a recessionary backdrop, the
first enterprise agreements that were struck at the recently merged airline included
acceptance of staff reductions. While the airline’s management may well have dreamt
of a union-free future it recognised that, in the short term at least, its heavily
unionised workforce was an unavoidable fact of life. Whether this is true
‘accommodation’, or a management failure in ‘avoidance’ (Bamber et al, 2009) is
debatable. In addition, as Small (2002:31-2) notes, the sheer number of unions
covering workers at Qantas, particularly before the amalgamation process kicked in,
offered some industrial advantages to management, in terms of the potential to
exacerbate infighting and show favouritism to the ‘responsible’ unions. While
industrial action has occasionally flared at the airline, union compromises or outright
defeats became commonplace. Up to the end of 2000, James Strong’s period at the
13
helm at Qantas was characterised by experimentation as labour management strategies
fluctuated between an industrial relations focus aimed at reducing conditions and
HRM-style participation, development and empowerment programmes aimed at
increasing productivity and rejuvenating flagging morale. The growth of employee
cynicism in an industry and a company that had previously enjoyed a high level of
worker identification and discretionary effort has been a consistent theme emerging
from our interviews (also see Wilcox 2009).
Offshoring
Playing the offshoring ‘card’ has been a crucial component of Qantas’ industrial
relations strategy. The unions covering maintenance workers, in particular the
ALAEA covering licensed maintenance engineers, but also the Australian
Manufacturing Workers’ Union (AMWU) covering unlicensed aircraft maintenance
engineers, hold sufficient power to be disruptive; this situation encouraged
management to canvass the possibility of offshoring maintenance, in part to discipline
the unions and in part for cost-saving purposes. In 2006, Qantas announced it would
close heavy maintenance facilities in Sydney, with the loss of some 400 jobs, many of
them LAMEs – and move them to its base in Avalon, Victoria, where some LAMEs
were re-engaged through a labour hire company. There appears to be some
incoherence in Qantas’ strategy. Keeping the work onshore was described as a
compromise for the sake of the ‘brand’. The same has been said of the new Brisbane
facility (more below). However, the company has never abandoned its search for
competitive maintenance solutions around the globe, experimenting with offshoring to
Malaysia, Singapore and the Phillipines through 2007. The strategy is hardly without
risk. The Qantas brand, so integrally linked with safety, is not immune from union,
media and public criticism – especially if the criticism is safety-related and has
substance. The latter is undoubtedly an important factor in Qantas’ recent rescinding
of a cooperative agreement with Malaysian airlines over heavy maintenance, and its
commitment to the new Brisbane facility to service A320s (The Age, April 13, 2009.
In 2001, maintenance unions faced what was known as the ‘Auckland threat’, which
evaporated in 2005 when Air New Zealand announced its own plans to shed 600 jobs
and send heavy maintenance to overseas Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul
organisations (MRO)s. While in China, the Qantas executive general manager, John
Borghetti, announced that Qantas was considering moving maintenance to China or
South East Asia, because ‘costs were 20 per cent lower’ in some of these areas
(Courier Mail, 12 January 2006).9 He argued that these conditions made it vital that
management achieved competitive wage outcomes with its Australian workforce. ‘If
we can achieve those (savings) goals with our own people, great…if not then we have
to look at other options’, he said. While unions protested about cost-cutting and
management’s disingenuousness in raising offshoring while enterprise negotiations
were taking place, the fear that jobs would be lost overseas was a powerful impetus
towards cooperation with management (Courier Mail, 12 January 2006). Head of
As then Australian Workers’ Union leader, Bill Shorten claimed, Qantas executives were not
interested in sharing the cost-cutting pain; ‘[t]hey benchmark our wages against Shanghai and the deep
South of the US, and their own against New York and London’ (The Age, 10 March 2006). From the
late 1990s, it became almost routine for management to demand that workers must meet competitive
benchmarks set by maintenance providers overseas because fuel prices and lower wages elsewhere
were making the airline unprofitable (Courier Mail, 10 March 2006).
9
14
Engineering, David Cox, said that there was ‘no secret that Qantas [is] continually
looking for alternatives’ (Herald Sun, 4 April 2006).
But how safe is maintenance performed in overseas MROs? And how is the issue
treated in the airline employment relations literature? Belobaba et al (2009:307)
claim that:
While the verdict on this is still out (there have been no studies to date
comparing the bottom-line effects of these different strategies), evidence from
other industries that make substantial use of contractors is that the results vary
depending on the quality of the relationships among contractors and parent
firms and the employee groups of the different enterprises that work together.
Bamber et al (2009:3) question whether increasing outsourcing of maintenance will
erode safety, but do not reach a conclusion. As argued above, safety trends are
difficult to resolve at the level of hard statistics, but anecdotal evidence of safety
violations, as well as well documented ‘near misses’, provide a powerful sense that
safety standards are declining or, at least, at risk. While qualitative evidence like this
is often dismissed by the ‘pointy heads’, it works powerfully on the travelling public –
the airline’s customers – as long as the media is engaged.
Among other organisations, the Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association
(ALAEA, 2007) has argued that aircraft maintained in certain overseas MROs are not
as safe as those maintained by their members in Australia. As if in support, a series of
aircraft safety incidents involving aircraft maintained overseas, some of them serious,
were reported widely in the local media. In one example, an electrical failure on a
Qantas flight to Bangkok had to land on emergency power, with only an hour’s
backup. Then a jet serviced in Malaysia was found to have electrical wiring unsafe
because of mishandling (The Australian, 10 January 2008). A few months later, an
explosion in an oxygen tank tore a large hole in the side of a Qantas jet, forcing it to
make an emergency landing in Manila (Courier Mail, 30 July 2008). In June 2009, a
Jetstar plane travelling from Guam to Brisbane was forced to make an emergency
landing due to a fire in the cockpit. While ALAEA officials argued that the last major
maintenance on the plane (an A330-200 like the Air France crash off Brazil) had been
carried out cheaply in the Philippines, Qantas denied any systemic problem (Courier
Mail, 12 June 2009).
The frequency of these and other incidences seemed to indicate that the perceived
decline in aircraft safety and ‘best practice’ was more than the union ‘pressing the
safety button’ in its industrial relations struggles with airline management, and more
than an instance of traditional Australian ‘labourism’ regarding ‘foreign’ workers. To
the maintenance engineers, the practices in overseas MROs are an obvious point of
attack and, for very different reasons, union leaders echo management references to
the reputation for safety of the Qantas ‘brand’ which they feel is due, in large part, to
the skills and diligence of their members (Courier Mail, 1 February 2001). A Senate
Transport Inquiry (SSCEWRE 2007) into the transport sector heard claims that the
ratio of supervisors to unsupervised labour in some overseas MROs exceeded
acceptable limits – in some cases, one supervisor for up to 40 workers. It has also
been alleged that some overseas MROs had used prison labour (ALAEA, 2007), an
allegation strongly rejected by Qantas. The quality of maintenance performed in
15
some overseas MROs was also addressed in a recent Senate Inquiry into the Civil
Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) (see SSCRRAT, 2008). During testimony, the
then CEO declined to assert unequivocally that aircraft maintenance performed
overseas was ‘safe’. He merely asserted that it was ‘legal’ and ‘compliant’
(SCRRTAT 2008:68). That, however, only raised the question of the relationship
between the practices and the standards with which they were ‘compliant’ – and
safety outcomes.
After the spate of safety incidents at Qantas, CASA released the results of its audit of
the airline’s engineering and maintenance operations. Mick Quinn, the Deputy Chief
Executive Officer Operations, announced that the regulator had concerns about
organisational impacts on safety, indicating that management systems, especially
chains of accountability regarding the implementation of manufacturer and regulator
recommendations, were in need of review. Current practices were revealing adverse
trends, he said:
In terms of the management structure of the organisation, it's not CASA’s
business to tell Qantas how to manage its business. All we're doing is talking
about the application of the business model they've put, and what outcomes
that's providing. And at the moment, we believe that there are some potential
areas where things might slip through the gaps, and they need to tighten up, as
I said, the split of accountability and responsibility (CASA media release, 1
September 2008).
Recent media scrutiny in relation to the aforementioned ‘near misses’ has highlighted
the impact of managerial cost-cutting and regulatory inaction. After the forced landing
in Manila, a retired maintenance engineer was reported in the press as saying that
there were now too many ‘pencil inspections’ at Qantas where staff were ‘ticking off
a document to say something has been done when it has not’ (Courier Mail, 30 July
2008). AMWU National Secretary, David Oliver, reported that their union members
were increasingly concerned that the airline’s reputation for safety was at risk because
of budget constraints and outsourcing. Although Qantas management downplayed
union claims as mere strategic positioning in the lead up to industrial negotiations, a
survey of 200 unionised maintenance workers across four facilities revealed that
nearly two-thirds of respondents had expressed concerns about aircraft safety. 62 per
cent of the workers believed that poor resourcing led to cut corners and only 29 per
cent of workers ‘had faith that management understood issues relating to safety and
staffing’ (AMWU website, 2008; The Australian, 11 September 2008). Qantas
management were embarrassed by the discovery that an aircraft maintenance engineer
had worked at one of their facilities for approximately one year, using falsified
qualification documentation that was not checked with the CASA database during the
recruitment process. Indeed, Qantas upgraded the employee’s qualifications and was
about to give him a pay rise, when the paperwork anomaly – a rather large hole in the
swiss cheese – was detected (The Age, 25 August 2007; The Australian, 22 August).
The industrial relations context should be at the forefront of any discussions about
maintenance outsourcing, passenger and worker safety. A case in point is the
establishment of aircraft maintenance facilities in Brisbane. In early 2001, Qantas
announced its intention to build a $65.8 million maintenance facility in the
Queensland state capital (The Australian, 1 February 2001). In Qantas management’s
16
view, there were several justifications for the Brisbane option. Firstly, the Queensland
government had been offering massive subsidies to companies in and around the
airline industry to create a transport ‘hub’ in the south eastern region of the state. A
bidding war between states has been encouraged by the airlines, using taxpayers’
funds as bargaining chips. Secondly, a perception of industrial passivity was a tacit
part of management calculations; indeed, one Melbourne newspaper lamented that
Melbourne had lost out on the bid to a less industrially militant region because of
earlier disputes between Qantas and construction unions over building projects at
Tullamarine Airport (The Age, 1 February 2001). Since then, operations at Avalon in
Melbourne have been expanded, but predominantly on the basis of a heavy reliance
on agency staff who work under a separate industrial agreement with lesser conditions
(The Age, 10 March 2006).
In 2008, it was revealed that the Workplace Ombudsman was investigating an
allegation that Qantas was further stretching the limits of ‘flexibility’ by preparing a
list of personnel who could be used as strike breakers if required, breaching the
freedom of association provisions contained in the Workplace Relations Act (The Age,
27 June 2008). Thirdly, Qantas management has used the Brisbane base as an
industrial carrot, saying on numerous occasions that keeping heavy maintenance in
Australia was only economically viable if unions agreed to a range of changes around
more flexible work practices, such as longer shifts and an ‘overtime bank’ system
where workers take ‘time in lieu’ during lulls, rather than being paid upfront with
penalty rates (The Age, 10 March 2006). Dixon’s replacement as CEO, Alan Joyce,
said that Qantas management had spent two years negotiating the flexibilities it felt
were necessary. ‘It’s all about the ability for people to extend shifts’, he said, ‘to be
able to work on aircraft until the aircraft are repaired’ (Courier Mail, 12 May 2009).
This approach ignores evidence from research into the effects of long hours, such as
‘human factors’ and accident investigation expert, Alan Hobbs, who concluded from a
1998 survey of 1359 LAMEs carried out for the Australian Transport Safety Bureau
that maintenance errors were more commonly found in work completed at the end of
long overnight shifts, due to fatigue, and pressure (Courier Mail, 26 February 2001;
Dawson et al, 2001; Hobbs, 2008:22-3). It would appear that, while government
ministers have been keen to make vote-winning announcements about job creation,
they have been less concerned about regulating the quality of those jobs, and less
interested in investigating their implications for safety.
Safety and Skills Policy
The safety of airline maintenance practices is crucially dependent, not only on the
industrial relations context, but also on the nature of the skills, training and
qualifications of aircraft maintenance workers. The issues of safety, offshoring and
the formation and deployment of skills are linked in obvious and less obvious ways.
Obviously, there is an argument that at least some overseas MROs derive a cost
advantage from less skilled and qualified – and paid – labour, which may compromise
safety. Less obviously, as ALAEA (2007) argue, the quality of training – and
therefore of skill – in Australia is dependent on heavy maintenance, since it allows
trainees to see aircraft in a stripped down condition, with their design principles
visible. This is an issue for further research. But it is worth mentioning that Qantas
has enjoyed a strong safety reputation based on the skills of its workforce, which it
has played a major role itself in developing through conducting heavy maintenance in
17
Australia. Moreover, for the past decade, the Qantas intake and output of apprentices
of approximately per year (Qantas Annual Reports, 200-2009) has contributed very
significantly to the aircraft maintenance industry’s Australian skills base. This itself is
a significant asset, and potentially a competitive advantage.
The quality of skills is also dependent on the effectiveness of the institutions that
supply and regulate them. There is an international shortage of LAMEs, which
threatens to become acute as the aviation industry continues to grow at an annual rate
of about 4-5%, while the workforce ages and skilled aircraft maintenance workers are
not replaced as they retire (IATA 2009; ALAEA 2007). Although there is some
argument that skills and workforce requirements will fall owing to the lower
maintenance requirements of newer aircraft, there is also a counterargument that new
aircraft will require new skills – for example, few know what the implications of a
greater use of composites will be. In addition, there have been persistent delays in the
delivery of the next generation of wide-body long-haul aircraft (the Boeing
‘Dreamliner’, and Airbus A380), forcing a reliance on an aging aircraft fleet. A
future shortage of aircraft engineers has been identified as a possible future brake on
economic growth, as aviation expansion is limited by an inability to maintain fleet,
potentially requiring special attention in government training policy. In Britain as
early as 1999, the Royal Aeronautical Society identified a looming shortage of aircraft
maintenance engineers as a crucial safety issue, which might lead to the ‘offshoring’
of maintenance to lower cost MROs, with the potential for a decline in the quality of
maintenance and therefore safety (RAeS 1999; House of Commons, 1999 a, b).
As a response to the shortage of qualified aircraft maintenance workers, the
International Air Transport Association (IATA), the main international employer and
trade body for the airline industry, has proposed that the length of training for
qualification be decreased, and that the training be recast into a more competencybased form to permit greater standardisation and economies of scale (IATA, 2009, ch.
11). In tandem with this initiative, in Australia, the Civil Aviation Safety Authority
(CASA), the national airline regulator, is currently recasting the existing licensing
system. ALAEA and others oppose what they see as CASA’s attempts to dilute
LAMEs’ qualifications through what they see as an irrational restructure, unsuited to
Australian conditions, and to extend license ‘privileges’ (the ability to sign the
‘release to service’) to those who lack what they see as sufficient training and
experience. There is emerging in Australia an intense struggle over the content of
aircraft maintenance ‘skills’ and qualifications.
The recent Government Aviation Policy White Paper has foreshadowed that these
issues be resolved by the end of 2010 (Australian Government, 2009). There is,
however, an exhaustive consultation process taking place over what is essentially an
attempt to revise Australia’s licensing classification system to resemble that
developed in EASA, with a view to increased international transferability of skills and
qualifications. While there is some logic to this, the EASA system has come under
criticism, not least from Britain’s CAA, for failing to ensure sufficient skill in license
holders. There is insufficient space here to give more than a brief flavour of this
controversy.
In Australia, acquiring the license to ‘sign off’, which is the centre of the LAME
labour process, is dependent on training. Up to now this has involved the attainment
18
of a Certificate IV qualification, which normally takes three years to acquire, while
accumulating on the job experience and sitting what were called ‘CASA Basics’
examinations. Upon successful completion of the relevant exams, licenses were
issued, in one of five categories: engines, avionics, electrical, mechanical and
structural. The license holders would then undertake ‘type’ training on particular
aircraft and/or components, which would license them to sign off on that type of
work. The more licenses and types, the more remuneration, and the more valuable the
LAME was to a particular employer – although this logic has been stronger for small
to medium employers. The gist of the reform proposals are as follows: first, that the
examination process be transferred from the safety regulator CASA to the Australian
Qualifications Training Framework (AQTF), and conducted by Recognised Training
Organisations (RTOs) with CAR 145 accreditation. Second, that the license structure
be changed by redistributing skills from the present five categories to three. Third, by
the creation of another license category, certain less skilled/trained license holders
would be allowed to sign off on less complex work which previously required higher
levels of qualification. These recommendations will, of course, sound very familiar to
Labour Process afficionados familiar with Braverman’s accounts of Babbagisation.
Naturally, elements of the process are contested by two sets of interests: first, unions
are concerned that certain qualifications will be undermined or made redundant and
some existing license holders look set to have their licenses devalued in the process.
Second, the General Aviation sector, as distinct from the large passenger carrying
sector, has expressed concerns about the reshuffle, as well as the looming shortage of
LAMEs. There are also questions about the quality of the training. In part, these are
endemic to the AQTF, where concerns about the quality of assessment have been
expressed for many years (see SEWRSBERC 2000; NQC 2008). As a bulwark
against an erosion of quality, some have argued that the CASA Basic exams must
play a role. In short, reforms to the skill formation system surrounding aircraft
maintenance are proceeding concomitantly with broader reforms to the Australian
training system – including a recasting of the core language of competence itself
(AQFC, 2009). These clearly take us beyond the bounds of this paper (but see
Hampson and Junor, 2010).
Conclusions
We have outlined the elements of an emerging research agenda in airline industry
maintenance. Aircraft maintenance is a crucial part of the aviation sector, and has
been somewhat under-researched in the current literature on HRM/IR in the airline
industry. While aspects of airline maintenance are studied at length in several
literatures, these literatures are not well integrated. The safety science and human
factors literatures draw on experimental and organisational psychology, but the
unitarist assumptions of these literatures do not mix well with the pluralist approach
of employment relations studies. Nor have systematic links been drawn between the
safety science literature, with its categorisations of human error, and the literatures on
workplace learning and innovation. As a result there has not been a clear conceptual
distinction between those departures from procedure that are safety violations, and
those that are workplace innovations. Labor process theory is well placed to identify
the factors at work in the LAME labour process, and to conceptualise the ‘double
standard’ of the industry, in which airline maintenance workers are at once bound by
documented procedures, yet encouraged in various ways to depart from them. As we
19
have argued, this moves the nature of skill to the centrepiece of the analysis, since it
reveals the safety of air travel to be conditional on the skills of LAMEs, and on the
conditions in which they deploy those skills.
As we have suggested, in addition to technical skill, the skills of LAMEs involve a
number of ‘interpersonal’ and other skills that may not be properly catalogued and
may not be well registered in existing qualification structures. The ‘human factors’
literature goes some way to register these skills. Licensing, qualifications and skills
recognition processes may not pay sufficient attention to them, although the fact of
the reform process provides an opportunity to look at them again. Opportunity is also
evident in the recent Qantas decision to locate its A320 Airbus maintenance facility
onshore in Brisbane, albeit after some negative publicity. It is to be noted that these
decisions can be explained best in an industrial relations context – that is, the initial
decision to offshore maintenance was one in which cost factors interacted with a
powerful multinational playing the oldest and most powerful card in the IR deck –
international wage arbitrage. Similarly, the decision to locate maintenance in
Brisbane was conditional on industrial relations flexibilities. Upgrading the aircraft
maintenance industry itself may be contingent on upgrading the conceptual equipment
through which we view it, in particular by working through the tensions that arise
when it is viewed through the multiple perspectives outlined here.
References
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Committee for Employment, Workplace Relations and Education Inquiry into Workforce
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Bexley, NSW: ALAEA May
AQF Council (2009) Strengthening the AQF: A Proposal, Consultation Paper, May,
http://www.aqf.edu.au/Portals/0/Documents/022105r08_AQF_StrengtheningTheAQF_A4_HR.p
df, accessed 18/9/2009
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