« Avoiding Boring Meetings | Main | Feedback on this blog »

May 19, 2007

Changed Perspectives

It's amazing how a seemingly small event can so profoundly change your perspective.

Two events have had this impact on me in the past week.

The one that made me think about this post was actually the second event – the resignation of Margaret Jackson as chairman of the Qantas board. I have had deep qualms about the APA private equity takeover offer for Qantas. My initial reaction to Jackson's press comments was cynical. She stood to make a substantial personal gain if the bid succeeded. How could she avoid a conflict of interest I thought? I took some perverse enjoyment from the collapse of the bid. I don't like the arrogance of Private Equity much and it worries me that a consortium like that can have such a huge impact on people's lives.

But when Jackson announced her resignation, I felt sorry for her. Margaret Jackson is recognised as one of, if not the, leading business women in Australia. She has been on the Qantas board for fifteen years and chairman for seven. When the bid was announced she would have to have thrown the dice. Would she throw her weight behind the bid (with the personal cudos and financial reward she would receive if it succeeded) or would she fight it. I don't know how long she agonised over this decision, but it could not have been automatic. There was never a guarantee the bid would succeed. In the end, it sat on a knife edge and failed by the slimmest of margins. Had the late offer been accepted, or received by the deadline she would have been seen as a master strategist, placing the airline in a position for its next phase of growth.

As it is, she is seen to have mishandled the whole affiar. In business, you are either one or the other. A hero or a villain. Never a real person with strenghts and weakness. With both doubts and courage.

The other event to spark my thinking about changed perspectives was the screening earlier this week on ABC TV of the drama series Bastard Boys – a fictionalised account of the 1998 Australian Waterfront Dispute. Nominally this was a dispute between the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA), (led by John Coombs) and Patrick Stevedores (then owned by Chris Corrigan). This dispute was a seminal piece of Australian industrial relations history about the power and place of unions on the one side and the right of management to make changes to work practices on the other. The dispute involved almost everyone of note in industrial relations in Australia at the time, including Peter Reith (Minister for Employment, Workplace Relations and Small Business) in the Howard Government; Greg Combet (then Assistant Secretary of the ACTU) and Bill Kelty (the Secretary of the ACTU).

At the time, those of us on the left were horrified by Corrigan's tactics (backed by Reith) of sacking his whole workforce, putting balaclava clad security guards with guard dogs around the docks and bringing in a non-unionised workforce trained in Dubai.

Having been brought up in a working class family, I still too readily see bosses as the enemy and unions as on the side of good. Although I could see there was obviously a desparate need for waterfront reform I felt Corrigan's approach was beyond forgiveness. When Patrick bought a share in Virgin Blue, I considered not flying with the airline anymore.

Although, I have yet to watch the whole of the two episodes, Bastard Boys jolted me out of my comfortable oversimplification of the issue. In particular, it gave me a totally different view of Chris Corrigan – even though he believes he was misrepresented and charicatured by the series. I realised that like Margaret Jackson, Chris Corrigan was a real person. In his case he had invested all he had in Patrick and his own livelihood was on the line. It took me another step along the path in realising just how much my childhood view of unions as the good guys was also an unreal representation of the truth. Yes, wharfies had been treated badly in the past and the MUA had won protection for them. But the reality was that we needed new work practices on the waterfront and the unions were using bully boy tactics as well.

My own message to Chris Corrigan is to take heart from the series. No you weren't portrayed exactly as you would have portrayed yourself. But from the perspective of a deyed in the wool leftie like me, it made you a real person to me.

Another changed perspective.

Posted by chriscurnow at May 19, 2007 6:40 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.chriscurnow.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/380

Comments

Post a comment