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CEPU Bulletins
Telstra general
14/12/2009 E-Bulletin #24 - CEPU re-launches industrial campaign 1. Telstra: CEPU re-launches industrial campaign 2. Industrial action campaign: Telstra’s legal bid fails 3. Broadcast Australia: new discussions delayed 4. Nextgen wins NBN backhaul tender 5. Opposition anoints WorkChoices diehard 6. Cash for comment: Telstra asks customers what’s wrong? 7. More on Telstra’s cash for comment 8. Industrial action decision sets important precedent 9. Australia’s CEOs still in the money 10. Nanoparticles in the spotlight again 11. The US example: hunger on the rise 12. Commander M2 redundancies. 1. Telstra: CEPU re-launches industrial campaign Following strong indications from members that the latest Telstra EA pay proposal is not acceptable, the CEPU has re-launched its industrial action campaign against the company. The reactivation of the campaign comes after a series of membership consultations about a proposed pay rise of 10% over three years as opposed to the 12.5% that was offered in Telstra’s Employee Collective Agreements (ECAs). Although the EA proposal also includes a 2.5% sign-on bonus in the first year, this does not count for salary purposes, leaving EA employees worse off than their ECA counterparts. The CEPU advised Telstra that members simply could not accept an offer that left them at least $10,000 short compared to ECA employees, especially at a time when Telstra was returning near-record profits. Telstra’s Super Board is saying that Australia’s economy is currently the strongest in the developed world and Telstra has just returned a near-record profit of $4.1 billion, up 10% from last year. To argue that the cupboard’s bare in these circumstances is too much. This is not a company that’s about to go to the wall if it pays its workforce fairly. The CEPU has told Telstra that members want at least the same pay rise as was offered to those who picked up ECAs as well as compensation for going without any rise since the last EA-based increase in October 2007. The union has proposed that the company pay the full 4.5% as salary in the first year, with a sign-on bonus of 2.5%. 2. Industrial action campaign: Telstra’s legal bid fails Telstra has failed in its bid to stop the CEPU’s industrial action campaign aimed at securing a fair EA in the company, a bid made despite the company’s constant denials that such action was having any impact on their business. On Thursday 3rd December and again on Friday 4 December Telstra filed applications in Fair Work Australia for an order to stop the CEPU’s use of indefinite stoppages as part of our industrial strategy. Telstra argued that because the CEPU’s indefinite stoppage notices did not specify the exact locations or the exact time of day of the proposed industrial action, Telstra was not being given a proper opportunity to take defensive action to deal with the disruption to its business. That, in turn, the company argued, meant that the notices were not legal and so the CEPU’s action was unprotected. Deputy President Lawler disagreed, arguing that it was not necessary for a union undertaking nation-wide action to specify each and every workplace that would be affected. He also said that there was no need for a notice to specify the exact time of a stoppage as long as the notices said what day the action was going to occur. The decision effectively confirms the right of union members to maintain some element of surprise in their industrial tactics within the narrow limits allowed by current law. Predictably, Telstra has appealed the decision which will be heard on 11th December. 3. Broadcast Australia: new discussions delayed Broadcast Australia has told the CEPU it does not wish to enter into a fresh round of EA discussions until January next year. The delay will mean no pay rise before Xmas for BA employees. The CEPU had proposed an immediate resumption of negotiations in the wake of the recent NO vote against BA’s proposed agreement. As reported in E-bulletin #23, BA employees last month overwhelmingly rejected a proposed Enterprise Agreement which the CEPU had warned did not sufficiently address their concerns. BA has now acknowledged the obvious – that these concerns are real and not a figment of the CEPU’s imagination. However, the company says that it now wants time to consult more widely with its staff so as to determine a way forward. The CEPU has sent BA a number of draft clauses which it believes will resolve the issues that our members want to see addressed including classification structures, overtime and penalty payments and call out arrangements. It is to be hoped that BA employees are not now penalised for what has been management’s failure to listen and that any agreement reached next year will include back-pay for time lost in reaching a new agreement. 4. Nextgen wins NBN backhaul tender Leighton Holding’s wholesale telecoms carrier, Nextgen, has been awarded the whole of the $250 million Government tender to build new fibre backhaul links in rural and regional Australia. The Government’s Regional Backhaul Blackspots Programme (RBBP) was announced in April as part of the package of initiatives aimed at driving high speed broadband availability and take-up across Australia. The programme will involve the construction of six new fibre backhaul links, one in each state and territory (with the exception of ACT) and is expected to take 18 months. The project is based on a Build-Own-Operate model, with Nextgen being able to add its own fibre on top of the Government-owned section of the network and being required to operate and maintain the links for five years. While the Government capacity on the links will be used for wholesale services only, Nextgen will be able to act as a retailer if it chooses. Locations to be served by the new links include Broken Hill, Geraldton and Darwin. As E-bulletin readers will know, these towns are already served by Telstra. In this sense, characterising them as “blackspots” is somewhat inaccurate. But Internet Service Providers and Carriers have long argued that the absence of backhaul competition in many parts of Australia has allowed Telstra to hold prices at unreasonable levels and that this in turn has made competitive provision of broadband uneconomic in much of rural and regional Australia. It remains to be seen, however, whether the creation of the duplicate backhaul networks will indeed lead to more investment by ISPs in these areas and whether Nextgen will be able to offer prices that meet the demands of ISPs and still remain profitable. 5. Opposition anoints Work Choices diehard The Liberal Party crisis has seen the elevation of Tony Abbot, an arch-conservative and WorkChoices true believer, to leadership of the Federal Opposition. Abbott won notoriety in 2007 when an amateur video recorded at an electoral function captured him admitting that WorkChoices had removed important employee protections. But this didn’t really matter, said Abbott, as if you were being abused or exploited by one employer the answer was simply to find another. Easy – unless perhaps there wasn’t another or you couldn’t afford to be out of work while you looked for one. As recently as July, Abbott has said that a Coalition Government would have to “revisit” workplace relations laws because Labor had gone too far in winding back Howard’s “reforms”. He repeated the message at his press conference on becoming leader, saying that while WorkChoices is dead, Australia still needed to have a “free and flexible economy.” ACTU President Sharan Burrow warned that this message was a barely disguised promise by Abbott to do the bidding of big business and bring back the Liberals’ hardline industrial relations laws. “It is code for a return to WorkChoices,” she said. “It would be terribly unfair for working Australians to face even greater job insecurity when so many have lost their jobs or faced cuts to their hours of work through the Global Financial Crisis.” Abbott is also on record as suggesting that the retirement age should be raised to at least 70. 6. Cash for comment: Telstra asks customers what’s wrong? Telstra wants its customers to help it sort out its service problems. With complaints to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman about Telstra doubling last year, the company says it is reaching out to customers to find out just what it needs to do to lift its game. It wants 18,000 customers nationally to spend 10 minutes a fortnight on on-line surveys and discussions. Participants will be eligible for cash prizes. How good is that? But what about feedback from the supply side of the service equation? Telstra employees have their own insights into the causes of the company’s service problems: • job reductions • increasing workplace pressures in both customer- facing and field workforce operations, • the introduction of performance-based and piece-rate pay systems and, of course, • the use of cheap off-shore labour to replace domestic staff. Many Telstra employees would be only too happy to spend 10 minutes a fortnight explaining these facts of life to David Thodey and his team if they thought they would really get a hearing – and have confidentiality guaranteed. 7. More on Telstra’s cash for comment Telstra’s cash for comment is under scrutiny following the revelation that a former Telstra spin doctor is spruiking the telco’s new customer feedback campaign. This person left Telstra’s employment in 2002 has worked since in corporate relations and currently runs her own PR outfit. Whilst appearing on radio and TV as an angry Telstra customer as part of the company’s new “My Telstra Experience” it now appears this person has links back into the company. Members might like to go to the following weblink for the full story to make up their own mind: Telstra's Cash for Comment Telstra received 104,000 customer complaints last year. 8. Industrial action decision sets important precedent In a decision that has implications for the wider union movement, Fair Work Australia has ruled that members of the Australian Worker Union (AWU) were not taking unlawful industrial action when they abandoned strike plans and returned to work. The AWU had notified Boral Resources that it would conduct 24-hour stoppages on Monday 9 and Tuesday 10 November at its Dunmore quarry, near Kiama on the NSW south coast. The company accepted that it had been properly notified of the action. But the union and employees later decided against proceeding with the second 24-hour stoppage on the Tuesday. In an unusual strategy, Boral on the Tuesday responded by seeking an urgent order against the union, arguing before FWA that it had taken defensive measures, such as cancelling deliveries and the arrival of a train, to prepare for the stoppage, and that as a result employees were not working in their customary manner. The union, however, argued there was no basis for the company’s application, as any deviation from the workers' customary work practices was caused by the company. Maurice Blackburn Senior Associate Giri Sivaraman, who represented the AWU, said that the company had taken a novel approach in arguing that deciding not to take industrial action could be construed as industrial action. He said the Tribunal’s decision confirmed that under the Fair Work Act, bargaining representatives are able to give notice of intended industrial action but then choose not to proceed with it. 9. Australia’s CEOs still in the money Australia’s chief executives are not exactly doing it tough, despite the recent financial crisis. In fact, almost 20% of CEOs at Australia’s biggest companies received bonuses of more than $1 million last year, according to a study conducted by independent pay consultants, Guerdon Associates. Although the sharemarket suffered its worst 12 months since 1982, 33 CEOs shared $67 million in annual bonus payments. The payouts come at a time when thousands of Australian workers are being subjected to wage freezes to help boost corporate profitability. Leading the pack was Allan Campbell of AJ Lucas Group, a mining services company, who received a bonus of $6.5 million in 2009, dwarfing his $500,000 basic salary. The bonus was paid as the company share price more than halved, from $6.56 to $3.18, in the 2009 financial year. Westpac chief executive Gail Kelly was the highest-rewarded woman on the list, coming in third with an annual bonus of $3.5 million. Ms Kelly also received 194,347 Westpac shares to compensate her for benefits that she gave up as chief executive of St George, her former employer - shares now worth $4.8m. In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, the Rudd Government has successfully introduced legislation limiting executive termination payments – the “golden parachutes” with which executives floated gracefully away from toppling companies, leaving employees and shareholders amid the ruins. More recently, the Productivity Commission has proposed a “two strikes” policy that would see entire company boards have to stand for re-election if 25% of shareholders voted against executive remuneration packages two years in a row. At present, such shareholder votes are not binding – much to the frustration of Australian shareholders who have been lodging protest votes in ever-increasing numbers over the last few years. 10. Nanoparticles in spotlight again A recently released report has raised new concerns about the presence of nanoparticles in a number of common household items. The report by the Australian Institute has identified sunscreens, cosmetics and food packaging as products containing nanoparticles, materials they warn could pose a similar environmental health impact to asbestos. The lack of mandatory labelling laws or safety tests for products containing nanomaterials also increases the risks for Australian workers and consumers. The report comes on the back of a Friends of the Earth investigation into the nanomaterials content of leading Australian brands of concealers and foundations which named products sold by Revlon, Clarins, Clinique, Max Factor, the Body Shop, L’Oréal, By Terry and Lancôme Paris as containing nanoparticles. The European Union has passed laws making it mandatory for all products containing nanoparticles - which are 100,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair - to say so on the label. But while a NSW parliamentary inquiry has recommended that labelling requirements for cosmetics include the identification of nano-scale materials, in Australia there is still no requirement for manufacturers to label their nanotechnology products. FoE accused the companies of using Australian women as guinea pigs for the potentially dangerous technologies and urged governments to pass labelling and safety laws for the products. 11. The US example: hunger on the rise Former Telstra CEO and Republican Party supporter/campaigner, Sol Trujillo often reflected on the free market miracle that is the US. However, years of neglect and wage cutting under the leadership of his ally George Bush has seen the number of Americans who do not have access to adequate food increase to 49 million last year. The figure, contained in a US Department of Agriculture study released in November, is the largest number since the Government has been keeping track of such figures. Nearly 17 million children in the US live in households where food is in short supply or go hungry. The vast majority of the families struggling to feed themselves had at least one adult member in the workforce – but at wages too low to meet the families’ basic needs. It is to be hoped that President Obama will honour his election pledge to eliminate hunger among children by 2015. 12. Commander M2 redundancies The CEPU has been in discussions with M2 regarding proposals to make five employees redundant. The redundancies are calculated under the Commander Metropolitan Service and Support Agreement 2005 and a number of the employees are ex Telstra. Notices have been issued and their last day at work will be 23rd December 2009. It is pleasing that from that date the company will have the employees on “gardening leave”, i.e. there will be no deduction from entitlements even through the redundancy does not take effect until 4th January 2010. Members who need assistance with any calculations on their package should contact the Branch Office in the first instance. |
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Europe: European transnationals abuse workers’ rights in America | Middle East: Domestic workers in the Middle East have a horrible time : Little better than slavery | Mexico: One dead in clashes at Cananea copper mine | France: Unions call for further action against increase in retirement age | Global: Photo-essay: The world's most repressive workplace environments | France: Millions protest over higher pension age | USA: Mott's Strike in Media Spotlight on Labor Day | South Africa: Strike suspended: Unions claim victory | India: Trade unions go on a 24-hour nationwide strike | Global: Unions Step up Pressure for Jobs and Social Justice– One Month to World Day for Decent Work | USA: Obama Unveils Huge Infrastructure/Jobs Program at Milwaukee’s LaborFest | France: Unions to Strike as Sarkozy Pension Bill Debate Starts | Mexico: ICEM Condemns Repression of Workers by Government, Grupo Mexico | South Africa: Did the World Cup Wreck South Africa? | North America: Hyatt faces strikes and protests in cities across North America
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NSW Telecommunications & Services Branch
