Qantas found to have illegally stood down safety worker

ABC NEWS (Australia)

A New South Wales court has found Qantas guilty of a criminal charge for standing down a health and safety representative in the early stages of the COVID pandemic. The transport workers union has welcomed the verdict.

Transcript

00:00 We were in 2020 looking at a possibility of running a precedent case in the courts, once

00:09 again holding Qantas account of how they treat their people, what's been really a test of

00:16 time for our member-involved Thea Theramidesis, who has stood with us as we have stood with

00:23 him and today he's been fully vindicated of what he did on those days in the very early

00:30 time of the pandemic, as it was known then as a COVID-19.

00:36 He stood up for himself and his workers in his work group and advised them that they

00:40 ought not to go in with a bucket and a rag and wipe down the plane because unknowing

00:48 what the effects of COVID would have on workers was an unsafe act to perform.

00:55 He was ridiculed by Qantas.

00:57 He wasn't in any way supported by management to provide a safe workplace.

01:03 In fact what they did was put him to ground, they isolated him and they stood him down

01:09 at the end of the day.

01:11 That he stood down for 12 months and then he was illegally terminated and outsourced

01:16 by Qantas again.

01:17 So he got a double whammy.

01:19 The way in which Qantas has acted now, as they have done in the past with the 1,700

01:26 illegally terminated workers, so they did.

01:29 And Theo at the end of the day has had to wear the brunt of that.

01:33 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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