One cannot pretend this is anything other than a stark reminder that even the gleaming crown of national commerce cannot simply snap its fingers and erase the human cost of a few quarters of “cost cutting.” A large airline has been fined A$90 million for illegal mass dismissals during the pandemic, after 1,800 ground and baggage-handling staff were thrown off the payroll and their roles outsourced to contractors. The Transport Workers Union stepped in on behalf of those workers, and the money trail runs like a curious joke: A$50 million to the TWU now, A$40 million more to follow, while the 1,800 faces left behind had already received A$120 million in compensation in December. The judge who presided, Michael Lee, declared the penalty nearly the statutory maximum and a genuine deterrent for big, publicly traded outfits that might pretend to care only so long as the cameras are rolling. He lambasted Qantas for a lack of remorse and for prioritizing image over people, noting the company fought the case until it could no longer resist. This, we are told, is the highest penalty Australia has levied for breaches of labor law, a verdict that casts the airline’s pandemic-era actions as a calculated attempt to push TWU members aside.

And yet, while the court hands down a veritable public consequences invoice, one cannot help but feel the real lesson lies beyond the digits. The spectacle is rich: the mighty corporate monolith humbled not by a minor slap, but by a financial rebuke that pretends to be justice while still glimmering with the old politics of power. This is the sort of judgment that should make any modern conglomerate pause—if only to consider that dignity, once outsourced to the lowest bidder in a crisis, is not a negotiable line item on a quarterly report. For all the bravura about “protecting workers’ dignity,” the tale reads like a cautionary parable: if you forget who keeps the engines warm and the bags moving, you will eventually be reminded—with interest—that reputation and responsibility are not two coins in the same fate. May this serve as a genuine deterrent, not merely a headline, so that future swaggering executives recognize that the price of contempt for labor is not just public censure but a consequence measured in real, tangible sums.