Qantas Ground Workers Just Struck Again. The Airline Already Lost the Legal Argument in 2023.

On Thursday, Qantas Ground Services and Australian Air Express workers walked off the job for 24 hours at Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth airports, joined in Sydney by up to 400 safety screeners running rolling stoppages. The Transport Workers Union is demanding pay in line with the rest of the industry, more full-time jobs, and an end to a subsidiary structure it says exists to keep wages down and blur who is accountable when someone gets hurt. TWU national secretary Michael Kaine put it bluntly: workers are being "maimed and killed keeping these critical services going."

This is not a fresh grievance. It is the same fight Qantas already lost in court, twice. In November 2020, at the depth of the pandemic, Qantas outsourced the jobs of roughly 1,800 ground handlers at ten airports. The Federal Court found in 2021, and the High Court confirmed unanimously in September 2023, that preventing those workers from bargaining collectively and taking protected industrial action was a substantial reason for the sackings — a naked breach of the Fair Work Act, dressed up as a cost-saving pandemic measure. Qantas fought the finding all the way to the top of the Australian judicial system and lost every round.

The remedy phase dragged on for another year. In December 2024 Qantas agreed to pay $120 million in compensation. In August 2025 the Federal Court added a record $90 million penalty — the largest ever levied under the Fair Work Act — with Justice Michael Lee explicitly framing it as deterrence, ordering $50 million to go straight to the union that fought the case. Total damage to Qantas: roughly $210 million, against an outsourcing move estimated to save the airline about $100 million a year. The company did the math anyway and outsourced first, litigated for five years, and paid the fine as a cost of doing business.

That is the material lesson of this story: a corporation can commit a documented, court-proven violation of workers' basic organizing rights, drag the case through every appellate level available, and still come out financially ahead of where it would have been if it had simply bargained in good faith in 2020. The fine is a rounding error against five years of union-free restructuring. Now the workers who replaced the sacked in-house staff — hired into a fragmented web of subsidiaries specifically built, according to the courts, to weaken their bargaining position — are striking to win back the conditions the 2020 outsourcing was designed to destroy in the first place.

Qantas's public line is that it "remains committed to reaching an agreement" and has "well developed contingency plans" to keep flights running around the strike. That is the standard script: acknowledge nothing, absorb the disruption, wait out the workers. It is the same posture the airline held through five years of litigation it knew it was likely to lose. The lesson for every workplace watching is not that the courts eventually deliver justice — they took five years and left the company richer for having broken the law — it is that the only leverage that moves an airline mid-strike is workers refusing to load the bags, not a judge's ruling that arrives once the union's win no longer costs Qantas anything it can't absorb.

Sources

Australian Aviation: Qantas ground workers to strike over pay and conditions
Reuters via WIMZ: Qantas workers begin 24-hour strike at four airports
Straits Times: Qantas ground workers to strike next week
The Conversation: Will a record fine for Qantas deter other companies from breaking the law?
About Regional: Qantas fined $90 million for illegally sacking ground handling workforce