Australian airline Qantas will cut 850 local corporate jobs and outsource the work to consulting firm Accenture. Most of the roles will move to India, the BBC reported. The airline announced the plan on Tuesday as it speeds up spending on technology and AI.
The first cuts will hit finance, procurement, people and marketing staff. In an internal email to staff, chief executive Vanessa Hudson said the roles would shift "mostly" to teams in India and "some in Australia", the BBC reported. She said the cuts would begin in mid-2027. Qantas said it would redeploy affected staff "where possible", including into new roles in Australia.
Hudson said the deal with Accenture would modernise the airline's IT systems and make them "more efficient". She said Qantas spends more than AU$1 billion a year on technology. The airline runs more than 1,000 legacy applications that "were never designed to work together", she added. Qantas said the work Accenture takes over will "in time" be transformed further with automation and AI.
Hudson said the airline would consult staff and unions before making final decisions. "We know this will be difficult news for some of our people and this decision is not a reflection of their contribution or commitment," she said, according to the Guardian. Qantas has about 32,000 employees, about 28,000 of them in Australia.
Unions pushed back. The Australian Services Union said Qantas had earlier promised it had no plans to move jobs offshore and now needed to explain itself. Assistant national secretary Scott Cowen said workers who had kept the airline running should not bear the cost of technology change. "Sending more jobs overseas is not in the spirit of Australia," he said.
This is the third major corporate layoff plan in Australia in three weeks, the Guardian reported. National Australia Bank has targeted 2,500 roles and Canva 1,200. With Qantas, that adds up to about 4,550 corporate jobs in a month. Australian unemployment is at its highest level in nearly five years. High oil prices linked to the Iran conflict are also pushing firms to cut costs.
Rising jet fuel prices have hit Qantas. New customers who abandoned airlines with Middle East stopovers have partly offset that cost. Last week the airline said demand was holding up. It added that it would keep adjusting fares and capacity in response to fuel costs.