Alan Joyce, former CEO of Qantas, engaged in corporate “ethics washing” and heavily damaged the airline’s brand in the process. That’s the view of lawyer Josh Bernstein, speaking at the Sydney Writers’ Festival this week.
“Alan Joyce positioned himself as a social justice CEO, promulgating impeccable corporate values. I argue in the book that the sorts of values, respect and decency and so on, that corporations promote are often a form of ethics washing,” he told a crowd in Ryde Library, referencing his book, Working for the Brand: how corporations are destroying free speech, released last year.
“Joyce said, ‘I’m a social justice CEO, and I’m going to align myself with some progressive causes’. At the same time, he set about sacking about 30-40 per cent of employees and replacing them with cheaper, outsourced labour. He railed very publicly against company tax and corporate tax cuts. Qantas didn’t pay the company tax, and received huge Taxpayer Assistance, which he was very happy to receive, and he said he wouldn’t return.”
It should be noted that Bornstein has a large dog in this fight. He represented the Transport Workers Union (TWU) in its 2020 case against Qantas over the airline’s illegal sacking of some 1,820 ground handling employees during the COVID pandemic. The TWU won the case and a High Court appeal in 2023 but the final penalty amount is yet to be settled.
“We’ve won the case, and we’re currently arguing before the Judge about what penalty should be imposed. Qantas says the most we should penalise them is $18 million, and we’re arguing for $120 million. Either way, it’s a very substantial penalty for sacking the workers during the pandemic because they were trying to stop them taking collective action, protective industrial action, and we were able to win that case, despite everyone saying we were going to lose when we started,” he said.
In his book, Bornstein wrote about his experience and how the Qantas brand has suffered.
When investigative journalised Adele Ferguson criticised Joyce over a decade ago in the Fairfax-owned Sydney Morning Herald Joyce cancelled all of Fairfax’s publications in Qantas lounges and airplanes and cancelled Qantas’ advertising contract with the publisher. Nine now owns the old Fairfax publishing assets. Then Joe Aston, more recently, “wrote some pretty strong criticism of Joyce,” in Bornstein’s words in the Nine-owned Australian Financial Review, Joyce again cancelled the newspaper.
“This just encouraged Joe Aston to go even harder and to leave that organisation. Alan Joyce essentially turned Qantas from a company that I used to think was pretty amazing into a budget airline charging premium fees, premium ticket prices, and with a brand that’s been heavily damaged,” said Bornstein.
For the lawyer, this is proof of the contradiction between companies and values.
“When you sign your employment contract and you look at the detailed terms and conditions, what it says is you invariably have to agree to company values. I argue that company values are a contradiction in terms, as companies can’t have values.
“Nevertheless, they profess to have values, and those values and requirements can never be met by everybody on a 24/7 basis. You cannot sanitise people of all their humanity when they go to work.
Bornstein said that corporations have begun investing less in paying taxes and employing people, and much more in curating “immaculate brands to convince us of their legitimacy and their decency”.
“What is the dividing line between having the ability to fully participate in democracy and corporations being able to regulate that? One answer is that’s something that brand ambassadors do.
“People like David Beckham are paid hundreds of millions of dollars to promote an image of an organisation by being angelic, good-looking and glamorous. There’s a real moral question and philosophical question, which is, is there any amount of money people should be exchanging for foregoing their right to participate in democracy?”
Bornstein believes that the way to solve the issue is by more heavily regulating companies, though cautioning that “regulation needs to be nimble and flexible, changing and assessing new business landscapes”.
He also believes a trade union revival would help steer companies back towards having a positive impact on society.
“There is no book on the history of the positive impact of corporations, because they haven’t contributed anything positive,” Bornstein said. “Corporations are culturally powerful and there needs to be heavier regulation”.
In its last term, the Albanese Government focused on giving employees more bargaining power and trying to reverse some of the damaging effects of outsourcing labour. In the US, Joe Biden focused on similar policies, but Bornstein said he wasn’t able to communicate them “eloquently”.
The wick might be slowly starting to turn up for large companies, however. Just this week, Energy Australia was brought to court over “Go Neutral” carbon offset program and it lost to, having to apologise to 400,000 customers in the process.
