Qantas has taken the advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic, a “tragedy for the nation” by illegally outsourcing the roles of 1820 workers, counsel for the Transport Workers’ Union has told the Federal Court.
“That’s what motivated them,” Noel Hutley SC, said. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, which as Qantas conceived of it, would return them to the order of AU$100 million per year. And that was not AU$100 million per year on a one-off basis.”
The apology in this regard by Qantas rings "wholly hollow" and it has failed to make changes that ensure such actions never happen again, a judge has been told.
In the Federal Court in Sydney on Tuesday, Justice Michael Lee continued hearing submissions on the penalty to be imposed on Qantas for the biggest case of illegal sackings in Australian history.
Being seen as historic event in Australian corporate history, last October, Justice Lee ordered Qantas to pay $120 million to the ground staff as compensation for their economic loss, pain and suffering since their jobs were outsourced during the COVID-19 pandemic.
As the hearing to determine Qantas’ penalty for illegally sacking workers’ contracts during the Pandemic continued on Tuesday, the TWU has asked the court to award the maximum penalty of $121 million.
Noel Hutley SC, for the union, told Justice Lee that he should reject Qantas' submission that after four-and-a-half years of litigation, it was now contrite.
"Your Honour will not brush aside, as Qantas urges in its submissions, its vehement and regular denials of wrongdoing (and) its rejection of Your Honour's findings, which persisted all the way to the High Court," he said.
The Federal Court previously found the company had illegally dismissed workers and prevented them from taking industrial action against the company. Qantas’ appeal to the Full Court was dismissed, and that determination was upheld by the High Court.
On these development, late last year, Qantas agreed to compensate a total of AU$120 million to the 1820 affected ground staff whose contracts were terminated.
The first day of hearings on Monday involved the cross-examination of Qantas’ chief people officer, Catherine Walsh, who began the role in February 2024.
She told the court that the carrier’s agreement to pay compensation was evidence that the company was very sorry. Catherine Walsh told Justice Lee that "hopefully you'll see from the size of the compensation payment that, in fact, we are very sorry".
"We do wish for the workforce that was impacted to be properly remediated and the compensation that has been agreed could go some way to deal with that," she said.
On Tuesday morning, Justice Michael Lee suggested that if Qantas was truly remorseful, it would have picked a witness who was “there at the relevant time”.
Instead, Lee suggested that “a deliberate forensic decision” was made for chief executive officer Vanessa Hudson not to be cross-examined, despite Lee having given Qantas “every opportunity” to call Hudson or someone else who was there in 2020.
On Monday, Lee told the court that a “message must be sent to the broader corporate community that you can’t play the court for a fool and try to fashion your evidence in a careful way in order to try to dissemble what went on”.
As per Dailymail, Outside court, former Qantas worker Damien Pollard said union members were looking forward to the conclusion of the case 'to allow us to get on with our lives'.
'It's been a long fight, it's been very stressful for a lot of employees, so we are looking forward to the end,' he said.
