Qantas will launch its authorized problem within the High Court in a bid to overturn a judgement regarding its controversial resolution to outsource greater than 1600 employees through the COVID-19 pandemic.
Qantas is interesting two rulings by the Federal Court, which discovered the outsourcing of luggage handlers, cleaners and floor workers was unlawful.
The first listening to within the High Court will start on Tuesday, when the provider will make its case.
Qantas was discovered to have breached the Fair Work Act in outsourcing its floor operations to keep away from enterprise bargaining rights, after the Transport Workers’ Union took authorized motion towards the provider.
The airline, which retrenched employees in 2020, misplaced billions of {dollars} as a result of pandemic, which decimated the aviation sector.
A Qantas spokesman stated the airline’s capacity to legally outsource was to avoid wasting greater than $100 million a 12 months when its survival wasn’t assured.
“When we made this decision we were still in the depth of the pandemic and there was very little certainty about when our recovery would begin,” he stated.
The spokesman stated Qantas rejected the Federal Court’s ruling that it was not satisfied that stopping protected industrial motion in 2021 was not related within the resolution to outsource.
“We’ve always acknowledged that it would have been very tough on our ground handlers and the thousands of other employees who lost jobs because of the pandemic,” he stated.
Qantas will argue it couldn’t have breached the office rights of the workers, as they didn’t have the best to take protected industrial motion on the time the choice to outsource was made.
In a press release, the union’s nationwide secretary Michael Kaine stated the courtroom would decide whether or not Qantas’s axing of its workforce was the “largest case of illegal sackings in Australian history”.
“There are few who have not been affected by the cruel conduct of the Joyce-led Qantas management team,” the assertion reads.
“Whatever the outcome, workers must be applauded for their courage.
“Their dedication to justice has despatched a warning sign to employers up and down the nation.”
Maurice Blackburn principal lawyer Giri Sivaraman said Qantas lost the case on the facts.
“Now it is making an attempt a authorized argument to get the High Court to scale back protections within the Fair Work Act to make its actions lawful,” he stated.
“If Qantas wins, protections for all employees throughout Australia shall be diminished.”
A judgement just isn’t anticipated to be handed down for some months after the hearings.
Source: www.perthnow.com.au
