Qantas ground workers are planning strike action next week in a dispute over pay, job security and the fragmentation of employment agreements across the airline’s operations.
The Transport Workers’ Union said about 600 employees were preparing to walk out, while a further 100 workers at Australian air Express are expected to strike on Wednesday and Thursday.
The workers are mainly involved in Qantas Freight and the airline’s regional QantasLink service. The union wants a single enterprise agreement covering staff employed by Qantas Ground Services, Australian air Express, Qantas Airlines and labour-hire companies.
Several agreements are currently in place, a structure the union says has divided the workforce and weakened pay and conditions.
“Workers do not take this action lightly,” said Michael Kaine, national secretary of the Transport Workers’ Union. “Old habits die hard, and the same despicable Alan Joyce tactic of splintering the Qantas workforce has been dusted off by the new bosses who want to suppress wages and smash conditions.”
The dispute follows the outsourcing of ground-handling work during the pandemic, when more than 1,800 Qantas ground staff were unlawfully made redundant and replaced with outsourced workers.
The union successfully challenged the sackings. A federal judge fined Qantas 90 million Australian dollars in 2025, while the airline also agreed to pay 120 million Australian dollars to workers who had been illegally dismissed. Qantas has since paid both sums.
Under chief executive Vanessa Hudson, who succeeded Alan Joyce, the airline has sought to improve its relationships with staff and customers. Joyce left the role in 2023.
Qantas said it expected to meet the union on Friday and that negotiations over conditions for Qantas Ground Services employees were continuing. The airline said the agreement covered about 650 workers, most of them in Qantas Freight, although it said only 400 were union members eligible to strike.
“We remain committed to reaching an agreement with our Qantas Ground Services employees that includes annual pay rises for our people,” a Qantas spokesperson said.
The company said it was also seeking an agreement that addressed pay and provided more full-time opportunities. It added that contingency plans were in place to limit any disruption to customers and operations if industrial action went ahead.
The TWU has claimed that the historical division of Qantas’s workforce has removed experience from airport tarmacs and contributed to unsafe standards. It cited the death of a Qantas Freight worker last year as evidence of what it described as a deteriorating situation.
Qantas rejected the suggestion, saying there had been no increase in safety incidents since its ground-handling contracts were transferred to Swissport in 2020.
