"It was a brutal moment": Qantas employee recalls mass firing
A former Qantas worker has recalled the "brutal" moment he and almost 1,700 employees were fired from the airline.
Ramp supervisor Don Dixon spoke to A Current Affair about his time with the Qantas, just hours after the High Court ruled the Aussie airline illegally sacked hundreds of employees during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“I absolutely loved Qantas. It was a fantastic company to work for until Joyce took over,” the former employee of over 20 years told Ally Langdon.
“Some of the people I worked with [had been there for] 40 years, and it was an iconic Australian company, and it was a fabulous place to go to work."
“The last 15 years were just awful.”
Mr Dixon said that when Alan Joyce took over as CEO, “everything changed” revealing that loyalty diminished, and he was made to feel like a “dinosaur”.
According to Mr Dixon, he and his team found out they had three months until they would be terminated via an announcement over a loudspeaker in the lunch room.
Host Allison Langdon, floored by the revelation, asked, “Is there any more cowardly way to tell someone who has served loyalty for 20 years they no longer have a job?”
“They could have mailed something, but I don’t think they would have paid for the stamp,” Mr Dixon responded.
“Over the loudspeaker, in the lunch room, we were all together. It was just a brutal moment.”
Mr Dixon claimed that finding other work after he was fired was challenging, given that the 20 years at Qantas left him with a specific skill set.
“Nobody wanted to employ you – when you worked at Qantas, it was a career, it was a lifetime, no one was going to leave because it was that good.”
“It’s not as if every company in Australia has a role for washed-up baggage handlers and cleaners.”
He said Wednesday marked the first day since what has been dubbed one of the largest sackings in Australian corporate history that he, as a union delegate, had heard “happy voices” on the other end of the phone line.
“We were a small part of history today – we won – we did it.”
In the landmark decision that saw former employees pumping their fists in celebration inside the courtroom, Qantas has issued a formal apology to its workforce after the High Court declared its actions unlawful when it terminated the employment of over 1,700 ground crew members during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The court upheld two prior rulings from the Federal Court that deemed the airline's outsourcing of baggage handlers, cleaners and ground staff to be in violation of the law.
Image credits: A Current Affair