blog Thought Telstra was finished with its wide-ranging outsourcing and offshoring initiatives? Not by half, if a report in the Financial Review newspaper this morning is to be believed. The newspaper reports (we recommend you click here for the full article):
“Telstra could outsource as many as 1000 jobs to the Philippines and India following a review by two management consulting firms that is due to be completed by the end of next month.”
This isn’t precisely an unexpected move. Compared with its competitors and other companies in the Australian technology sector, Telstra has historically had a huge focus on maintaining staff levels onshore. However, current business best practice is to shift as many call centre and other low level processing jobs offshore as possible, and Telstra is finally going hard down this route, after resisting it for years. Optus does it, Vodafone does it (although Vodafone has also recently established a big call centre in Tasmania) and so does every other Australian tech company of note.
As I wrote earlier this week for The ABC’s The Drum in the context of the SPC Armona debate: “SPC Ardmona looks set to lose some 700 jobs following the government’s funding rebuff this week, with thousands more jobs to be affected in flow-on industries, especially in the surrounding Goulburn and Murray Valley region. But surely this isn’t that big of a deal? IBM alone was reportedly set to excise 1,000 or so local staff late last year in just one round of redundancies. And it’s not the first time, either – Big Blue regularly knocks off many hundreds of Australian workers here or there. HP does the same, and so does Telstra and Optus.”
Image credit: Telstra