Back in November 2020, as borders slammed shut and air travel collapsed, Qantas Airways made a brutal call: it would outsource its last in-house ground operations at 10 airports. More than 1,800 baggage handlers, cleaners and ramp staff were cut.

Management pitched it as survival. The airline was bleeding cash, and outsourcing promised $100m in annual savings plus $80m in avoided capital expenditure. But the Transport Workers’ Union (TWU) called it something else: union-busting. The timing was no accident, they argued. Enterprise agreements were about to expire, opening the door to strikes and new bargaining. By outsourcing during the pandemic lull, Qantas could sideline its unionised workforce before that window reopened.

The stage was set for one of the most consequential workplace cases in decades.

The first shot came in July 2021, when Justice Michael Lee of the Federal Court sided with the TWU.

He found Qantas had breached the Fair Work Act’s adverse action provisions. Even if Qantas had “commercial imperatives” for the decision, they weren’t the whole story. Qantas had failed to discharge the reverse onus required by the Fair Work Act - it could not prove that preventing collective bargaining or industrial action was not a “subtantial and operative reason” in its outsourcing decision.

Justice Lee was satisfied that the Fair Work protections could extend to a future workplace right. That made it the first time an Australian court had ruled that mass sackings were unlawful because they were designed to suppress collective bargaining.

The scale of the dispute was matched by the firepower on both sides, with some of the country’s most prominent silks and firms drawn into the fight.