Federal Court Fines Qantas A$90m for 2020 Illegal Outsourcing of 1,820 Ground Staff

Australia has seen this movie before: the 1998 Patrick Stevedores waterfront dispute used corporate restructuring and sackings to weaken union power until the Federal Court and High Court intervened. Today’s Qantas ruling fits a long trend where firms deploy outsourcing during shocks (here, the 2020 pandemic) to reset labor costs and bargaining leverage, and courts later test whether those moves cross legal lines. The judge’s emphasis on “real deterrence,” and directing A$50m to the union because regulators stayed on the sidelines, signals a shift toward private enforcement of labor norms when the state hesitates. Over the next century, this matters less as a one-off fine and more as a recalibration of the boardroom calculus: when suppressing collective bargaining carries nine-figure downside and reputational damage to a quasi-national symbol, the “cost-of-doing-business” logic weakens. Still, beware easy narratives—Qantas did face existential 2020 pressures, and deterrence only works if penalties consistently outweigh long-run outsourcing gains. As with earlier cycles in Australian industrial relations (from the 1907 Harvester Judgment to 1990s enterprise bargaining to the Fair Work era), the pendulum swings; this case nudges it toward stronger collective rights amid post-pandemic rebalancing of labor and capital.