Qantas has allocated $90 million to pay its employees a one-off bonus to recognise their efforts in turning around the airline group.
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.
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.
