Qantas Asks Executives to Volunteer for Bag Duty

When you must ask your senior executives to volunteer to give up their cushy offices on a temporary basis to work the front lines, you know the struggle is real.

That’s what Australian national airline Qantas had to do to combat staffing shortages that have plagued carriers across the globe.

Qantas has asked its senior executives and managers to volunteer to work as baggage handlers to help alleviate some of the congestion and chaos caused by a labor shortage and pent-up demand for air travel by the flying public, according to Fortune magazine.

The airline would like to stockpile at least 100 executives who are able to volunteer for baggage handling duty over the next three months.

In an internal memo seen by Fortune, Qantas said it would train executives and managers as to how to handle ground operations, including loading and unloading as well as how to drive the vehicles used to transport bags from the tarmac to the conveyor belts in the airport.

If that sounds like a case of ‘desperate times call for desperate measures,’ it’s true. The situation has only intensified, instead of lessened, in the previous months. At Heathrow International Airport in London, the facility serves as the poster child for problems with a literal mountain of luggage waiting to be claimed.

At one point last month, Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian ordered an empty plane to fly to London with its only passengers on the return flight being upward of a thousand pieces of luggage to be returned to Delta customers.

In a statement provided to Fortune, a Qantas spokesperson said, “operational performance has not been meeting our customers’ expectations or the standards that we expect of ourselves,” and that the company is “pulling out all stops to improve our performance.”