In a landmark legal ruling, Australia’s Federal Court has ordered Qantas to pay a record-breaking A$90 million ($59 million) penalty for illegally sacking nearly 1,800 ground staff during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The decision, which marks the largest corporate penalty for an employment law breach in Australian history, brings a five-year legal battle to a close and sends a powerful message to corporate Australia: breaking the law to boost profits will not be tolerated.
The fine comes after the airline’s 2020 decision to outsource baggage handling, cleaning, and ground operations, a move the court had already ruled was unlawful. Federal Court Justice Michael Lee, in a scathing judgment, stated that Qantas was not motivated solely by “commercial imperatives” but rather by a desire to prevent its unionized workers from exercising their rights to collective bargaining and taking industrial action.
The judge was particularly critical of Qantas’s lack of “genuine remorse,” noting that the airline had continued an “unrelenting and aggressive litigation strategy” even after its appeals to the full Federal Court and the High Court were rejected. Justice Lee said that Qantas’s public apologies appeared to be the “wrong kind of sorry,” focused more on reputational damage than on the “real harm” caused to the workers.
Of the A90 million penalty, A50 million will be paid directly to the Transport Workers’ Union (TWU), which brought the case against the airline. The remaining A40 million will be determine data later hearing, with the possibility of it being paid to the sacked workers. This fine is in addition to the A120 million in compensation Qantas had already agreed to pay its former employees.
For the workers who lost their jobs, the ruling is a final vindication. “It has been five long years. Today is a victory, not just for our colleagues but for all Australian workers,” said Anne Guirguis, who worked as an aircraft cleaner at Qantas for 27 years before being laid off.
While Qantas has said it accepts the court’s decision and has publicly apologized, the legacy of this case will linger. The penalty closes a dark chapter for the airline, which has been working to repair its reputation under new CEO Vanessa Hudson after a series of scandals, but it also serves as a cautionary tale for all major corporations. As Justice Lee put it, the penalty was intended to be a “real deterrence,” to ensure that the financial benefits of breaking employment law could “not be perceived as anything like the cost of doing business.”