Traffic in the Sicilian capital of Palermo is notoriously chaotic. Lights there, at least in the popular imagination, are regarded as offering mere guidelines to motorists.

“Court orders are not like the traffic lights in Palermo,” Justice Michael Lee said to a Sydney courtroom. “They are not there merely to be observed when it is thought convenient to do so.”

And so on Wednesday, Lee slammed Maurice Blackburn, the law firm representing 1820 sacked Qantas workers, for failing to distribute $120 million owed to the workers by a July 31 deadline and asking him for more time. The firm would be in breach of court orders, Lee said, and he signalled potential punishments.

Lee questioned why the delays “only became apparent in mid-June, despite issues developing over months”, and why he had not been informed earlier. “What ought not occur is that the court is presented, at one minute to midnight, with what was presented as a fait accompli,” Lee said.

He rejected the request by Maurice Blackburn to alter orders made last year that compensation for fired Qantas ground staff be completed by July 31, 2026 and scheduled a longer hearing on the matter for August 6.

“You’ll be in breach of [the orders by then], and we’ll see what consequences flow from that,” Lee said, though he cautioned that the firm may have a good explanation for the delay. He suggested the court may need to change the process for at least part of the amount that workers are owed because he had “no confidence” that Maurice Blackburn’s process would be completed in a timely fashion.

The more than 1800 former Qantas workers who were unlawfully sacked by the airline during the pandemic have been waiting for compensation for more than five years. Qantas has agreed to a $120 million compensation fund. Last year, Lee also imposed a further $90 million fine on Qantas, of which $40 million is to go to the employees. But only $5 million of the money has been paid so far, as Maurice Blackburn tries to calculate the financial and intangible loss suffered by each worker.

That has infuriated the former workers, some of whom have accused the law firm of delaying the process with unnecessarily technical calculations and seeking years of documents some of the cohort don’t have.

The Transport Workers’ Union expressed hope that workers would soon be paid. The union had brought the case against Qantas in 2020 after the airline sacked the workers in part to stop them from exercising a legal right to take industrial action as they bargained for more pay.

“These workers, backed by their union, won this case against all odds when not even the Coalition government was standing up to Qantas’ decision,” said TWU national secretary Michael Kaine.

“Maurice Blackburn added its experience, having fought and won other significant worker cases. But now it needs to step up to deliver the compensation these workers deserve into their pockets,” Kaine said.

Maurice Blackburn had no comment on the Wednesday hearing. It has previously told this masthead that its compensation effort involved about 40 people, including external experts, who had combed through more than 17,500 individual tax documents.

It had also followed up directly with claimants where material was missing or incorrect to help them find it, the firm previously said.

Lee noted that the court has control of more than $35 million that is due to be distributed to employees, as part of the penalty. Workers have already received an interim, court-ordered $3333 in direct compensation drawn from the penalty.

Justice Lee said his intention was that the “money should be in the hands of the workers and not the court”, and suggested that he may have to revisit the mechanism by which the remaining penalty is to be distributed. At present, that is awaiting Maurice Blackburn to finish its compensation calculations.

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