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77% of axed Qantas workers want jobs back

written by Adam Thorn | July 30, 2021

Qantas 737s parked at Sydney Airport, as shot by Victor Pody
Qantas 737s parked at Sydney Airport, as shot by Victor Pody

More than three-quarters of Qantas workers outsourced by the airline want their jobs back, a new survey has revealed.

The news was released hours before a landmark court ruling on Friday morning largely favoured the TWU and its objection to more than 2,000 ground handlers being made redundant earlier this year. It means outsourced employees could potentially regain their jobs or receive compensation, though that has yet to be determined.

The survey results, which also found 75 per cent of workers hadn’t secured new full-time work, will likely add to calls that the employees should get their old jobs back.

Both Qantas and Jetstar removed ground handling operations this year at the Australian airports where the work was done in-house, which included Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, shifting them to external businesses including Swissport and dnata.

The TWU hired Waterfront dispute lawyer Josh Bornstein to argue the airline’s actions contravened the Fair Work Act because employees at the new companies are now no longer entitled to terms secured through enterprise agreements. Qantas had consistently denied it has done anything unlawful.

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In his ruling, Justice Michael Lee said, “Although I do not think that the intent of the outsourcing decision was to hobble the industrial influence of a perceived ‘militant’ industrial organisation, given the nature of the Union’s membership and its members’ roles, outsourcing ground operations to third party contractors would be an effective way of going about the fulfilment of such an aim.”

However, he also said, “I am reasonably satisfied on the balance of probabilities, that the fact affected employees were members of the Union was not, in itself, a substantial and operative reason for deciding to make the impugned outsourcing decision. That aspect of the Union’s case fails as a consequence.”

Finally, he concluded he was not satisfied that Qantas had proved on the balance of probabilities that its domestic and international chief, Andrew David, did not decide to outsource the ground operations for reasons which included the “Relevant Prohibited Reason”.

“As will already be obvious, this conclusion reflects my unease as to the state of the evidence on this fact in issue and, in particular, Mr David’s evidence when viewed in the light of all the other evidence to which I have made reference.”

Bornstein called the decision a legal first.

“The Federal Court has found for the first time that a major employer has sacked over 2000 workers because it was seeking to deprive them of the ability to collectively bargain with the company for a new enterprise agreement,” he said.

“It is also the first successful challenge to a major corporate outsourcing exercise in 20 years. We put Qantas’ outsourcing on trial and Qantas lost. Large companies have used outsourcing for decades to prevent employees from being able to collectively bargain with them.

”As a result, employees have lost the ability to obtain proper wage rises. Once Qantas outsourced its workers and sourced them indirectly from labour hire agencies, it did not have to bargain with ground staff again.”

Qantas has yet to respond to the ruling, but has previously said in response that COVID has meant it has had to make major changes in order to survive.

“We recognise that this was a difficult decision that impacted a lot of our people but outsourcing this work to specialist ground handlers who already do this work for us in other cities across the country is not unlawful,” it said in a statement.

The case has been controversial because Qantas forged ahead with outsourcing the roles before the outcome of today’s case. It said it was able to do this because the union didn’t obtain an ‘interlocutory injunction’.

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Comment (1)

  • Milton

    says:

    Good luck getting former jobs back.

    They’ll have a long wait, as an appeal against today’s decision, has to be gone through yet, & that’ll take months’.
    If QANTAS wins their appeal, there’ll be no jobs for former workers’ to actually get back.

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