The Transport Employees Union spent $1m on a proposal to make sure Qantas would proceed using hundreds of floor workers in the course of the Covid pandemic, a court docket has been informed.
The union and the airline are at loggerheads within the Federal Court docket over compensation payouts for 1700 employees who had been illegally sacked by Qantas in November 2020.
Following the airline’s announcement about mass lay-offs, the court docket heard the TWU crafted a proposal “at a substantial price” for the continued employment of the bottom companies staff.
TWU nationwide assistant secretary Nicholas McIntosh defined the supply had concerned cost-cutting parts equivalent to a five-year wage freeze and the migration of full time employees to half time roles.
Nonetheless, he accepted it had not quantified the variety of staff who would make such a shift or the variety of voluntary redundancies to be undertaken.
The court docket was informed the bid in the end required “vital additional session with Qantas” as a result of the ideas must be formalised in industrial agreements.
“We’d agreed to these conceptual factors,” Mr McIntosh stated.
“We had been on the identical dance ground. We’d have been a great distance from the band, however we had been there.”
Qantas didn’t settle for the union’s proposal and the 1700 roles had been illegally outsourced to cheaper third get together contractors.
“We spent round $1m on (consulting firm) Ernst and Younger on behalf of our members to place forth a bid, so it’s disappointing that it by no means had any likelihood,” Mr McIntosh stated.
Qantas’ lawyer Richard Dalton KC informed the court docket the TWU nationwide assistant secretary had given “problematic” proof based mostly on a “flawed premise” in regards to the bid.
He defined Qantas’ resolution to outsource the bottom companies roles was “not a binary selection” and didn’t require the airline to decide to the union’s in-house supply.
“It was not a proposal that’s able to acceptance,” Mr Dalton stated.
“It was theoretical and at finest an invite to take part in an open-ended, undefined technique of discussions and session.”
Justice Michael Lee beforehand discovered the TWU supply had “no actual likelihood” of offering a business profit to the airline, which was combating the affect of Covid.
“I discover it tough to consider at any stage that Qantas was going to simply accept an in-house bid,” he reiterated to the court docket on Tuesday.
The Federal Court docket Justice is presiding over a seven-day listening to to find out the quantity of compensation the airline pays to the 1700 employees it illegally fired after rejecting the union’s supply.
The TWU has estimated the airline should pay “many, many tens of millions” in compensation for what it has declared to be the most important case of unlawful sackings in Australia’s company historical past.
Qantas contends its payout needs to be mitigated as a result of the workers would have lawfully misplaced their jobs the subsequent 12 months anyway because of the crippling affect of Covid on the journey business.
Mr Dalton stated the airline had been inspecting “drastic measures to stem the losses”, together with a three-year plan to scale back prices by $1bn, after they made the outsourcing resolution.
The listening to will resume on Wednesday.
