I personally applaud the Cobham pilots attempting to better their terms and conditions. The time is now, demographics and structural shortage can help get back what adversarial IR stripped away.
No it will end with them being unemployed when they lose their contract. QF will then either move the flying in house or outsource to another contractor. Network or Alliance would be more than capable, not to mention some other green fields operation that might pop up. There are alot of expats sniffing around right now and a DE command into a jet in Australia if you are financially secure would look pretty good. Especially if you throw in world wide staff travel etc.
Probably an extreme case but have a lot what happened to the BHP Tug Boat drivers in Port Hedland. Played industrial hardball won the fight but lost the war when they all got fired a month later.
The whole reason that large corporations use contract labour is that they can easily remove them if required.