Federal Court judge accuses airline of “performative remorse” and fines it $90 million for illegally sacking 1,820 baggage handlers.
Justice Michael Lee handed down his decision nine months after Qantas and the Transport Workers’ Union agreed the airline would pay $120 million in compensation to the sacked workers, taking the total cost of its illegal outsourcing decision to more than $200 million. $50 million of the penalty would go to the Transport Workers’ Union, the judge said.
Lee said allocating a significant proportion of the fine to the TWU would incentivise unions to pursue potential breaches of the Fair Work Act when the federal ombudsman fails to act, as he said it had in the case of Qantas.
Lee said he felt a “sense of disquiet and uncertainty as to precisely what went on within the upper echelons of Qantas leading up to the outsourcing decision” and described the airline as having “the wrong kind of sorry”.
Among the reasons Lee gave for imposing the record penalty was the airline’s attempts to obscure the decision-making process behind the outsourcing and the role the then chief executive officer, Alan Joyce, had played.
The TWU national secretary, Michael Kaine, said the union had won a “David and Goliath” battle and secured “the most significant industrial outcome in Australia’s history”.
The New South Wales Labor senator Tony Sheldon, a former TWU national secretary, said the $90m penalty against the airline confirmed workers had been “sacked in a ruthless, calculated act of corporate cost-cutting”.