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More than a year after the High Court ruled Qantas took unlawful adverse action against 1,700 of its former employees, the Federal Court has awarded one of them $100k in compensation for non-economic loss alone.

The workers were sacked when Qantas outsourced its ground-handling work in 2020, and in July 2021 the Federal Court's Justice Michael Lee found this was done to prevent them from engaging in industrial action.

His ruling was upheld on appeal in September last year, with the High Court confirming that taking adverse action against a person to prevent them exercising a workplace right contravened section 340(1)(b) of the Fair Work Act, regardless of whether that person had the right at the time of the action.

Today's compensation ruling involved three "test case" workers, representing the 1,700 employees who were dismissed following the outsourcing decision...