In the last month or so Qantas has been the story that keeps on giving.

There’s been outrage over the extraordinarily generous payout departed chief executive Alan Joyce is set to receive, an ACCC inquiry into potentially false advertising for selling tickets for non-existent flights, and accusations the airline had lobbied the government to stop Qatar increasing its flights to Australia.

Now, in a landmark ruling handed down by the High Court yesterday, the airline has been found to have unlawfully outsourced more than 1,600 ground crew jobs. While no figure has been set, Qantas faces a potentially huge compensation payout to the sacked workers.

The ruling was the culmination of a three year fight by the Transport Workers’ Union and the impacted employees, who believed their jobs were outsourced because Qantas wanted to avoid negotiating with them over their future pay and conditions.

As Shae McCrystal, Professor of Labour Law at the University of Sydney Law School writes for The Conversation today, while an employer can outsource jobs, Qantas was found to have done so at a time to stop them exercising their right to engage in collective bargaining and to strike.

The decision is significant, says McCrystal, because the union won. “These cases are notoriously hard to win. Because they turn on the subjective reasons of the decision maker, which can be very difficult to challenge in practice.”

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