Stranded passengers pin hopes on Qantas mediator

About 70,000 stranded passengers were on Sunday desperately hoping Australia's workplace regulator would end the stunning grounding of Qantas Airways' entire fleet over a bitter industrial row. Australia's national carrier announced its shock decision to lock out union staff and cancel all flights indefinitely on Saturday, a move that left the country reeling and its passengers scrambling for alternatives. The travellers' fate lies in the hands of the regulator Fair Work Australia, which reconvened an emergency panel Sunday. It could potentially suspend strike action for 90 days to give time for talks to take place or order a permanent termination to the dispute. Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who took the rare step of ordering in the workplace mediator to stem the danger posed to the national economy, appeared to agree with Qantas that the row should be ended with "certainty". "The government... is seeking to bring industrial action to an end and to have the dispute resolved so we can proceed with certainty with our iconic airline Qantas," she said in Perth Sunday. She added that the airline needed to function properly and in "circumstances where employees and Qantas know what the future holds for them". Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce said earlier he too was seeking certainty and that his planes could be in the air again late Sunday if the panel ordered a full termination of all industrial action. "A termination stops the lockout," he said adding that a suspension of the dispute was not good enough to settle a row tearing the 90-year-old airline apart. "A suspension may not necessarily mean the airline gets back in the air. If it's a suspension, we cannot put the planes back in the air without having certainty." Qantas said more than 68,000 passengers on 447 flights were affected by the grounding of 108 aircraft in 22 cities, with frustrated customers venting their anger at hubs from London to Asia and the US West Coast. Unions have been protesting against pay and restructuring plans that would see 1,000 jobs axed and the establishment of two new airlines focused on Asia. Joyce defended his extraordinary decision, aimed at ending three months of sporadic strikes by the baggage handlers, pilots and engineers unions that he said was slowly killing Qantas. "We could not survive that way. The only solution for Qantas was to take our own industrial action," he said of the union lockout that forced the grounding of planes. The decision was taken a day after an explosive annual general meeting where union anger was directed at management, said Joyce, while denying claims the grounding was pre-planned. He said he was forced to bring the acrimonious stand-off to a head as no progress was being made because of "outrageous demands" from unions, with the airline losing Aus$15 million (US$16 million) per week. But Tony Sheldon of the Transport Workers' Union, which represents ground staff, savaged Joyce's action, claiming it was a pre-meditated ploy that would hasten the airline's demise. "This was a preconceived, pre-planned attack on the Qantas brand by Qantas management," he told reporters.Pilots' union vice-president, Captain Richard Woodward, branding Joyce's grounding as an act of "insanity," called on Fair Work Australia to suspend industrial action for 90 days to give time for talks. "(Joyce) held the passengers to ransom while he blackmailed the government and the people of Australia," he said, as his union threatened legal action against Qantas, warning that the lock-out could be unlawful. As both sides traded recriminations, passengers were cooling their heels in Australia as well as at Qantas hubs such as Hong Kong, Singapore, London and Los Angeles. Competing airlines such as Virgin Australia and Malaysia-based Air Asia were meanwhile boosting passenger capacity or offering special fares to Qantas travellers, but many were stranded and angry. "This is completely unacceptable," said Michael Fung, a 57-year-old from Brisbane who was stranded in Hong Kong with his wife. "I won't fly this airline anymore."