Telstra reveals plans for another 200 job cuts

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news Telstra has announced a plan to cut staffing numbers via voluntary redundancies in its Global Contact Centre (GCC) group.

The firm told the Communications Workers Union (CWU) that it is looking to cut up to 200 positions at a meeting held to discuss the proposal on Tuesday, 17 November.

This is the second time in a month that Telstra has announced staffing reductions. On October 27th, the firm told the CWU it planned to make 480 positions redundant. The majority of the affected positions are held by Telstra employees, while the rest include agency staff.

The latest redundancy offer will be made available to most frontline and support employees in the group in various locations around the country.

Apparently, no specific redundancy targets have been set for particular locations, while a number of areas, including directory assistance and emergency (triple zero), will not be included in the proposal at all.

The firm also stressed that offshoring of jobs is not part of the proposal, which has been a cost-saving tactic of the company previously.

For example, in 2013 it was revealed that more than 10,000 overseas contractors were working for Telstra when the company was cutting jobs at home to help boost profit. This represented about 26% of Telstra’s then full-time workforce of 38,000. Furthermore, just a month ago, 34 jobs were offshored from Tasmania.

Telstra told the CWU that its view of the future of the GCC business involves retention of a critical mass of customer support workers in Australia.

The focus of the current move is rather on “increasing the productivity of its Australian operations – while at the same time boosting customer satisfaction levels”, a CWU statement says.

The union said: “This is the old mantra of doing more with less which usually means increased pressure on employment standards in such forms as ever-higher performance targets, unpaid overtime and reduction of rest breaks.”

While voluntary redundancies are preferred to forced cuts, the CWU voiced concern that the downsizing of the GCC group will mean increased workloads for those staff that remain.

The CWU said it expects a further meeting with Telstra on the GCC proposal this week. It suggests that members wanting advice on the voluntary redundancy offer should contact their state branch.

Image credit: Telstra

4 COMMENTS

  1. Does anyone know the numbers of iiNet, TPG, Adam, Transact and Internode as a group – or the telco industry as a whole – retrenchments over the past three or four years?

  2. Telstra has made it abundantly clear they are focusing on web based support for their products in shareholder meetings and media releases since Sol left. Is it any surprise that they are now looking at reducing staff, not to offshore but because the support burden is lessening.

    Renai, I wonder what information is available as to how many calls the various contact areas in Telstra are fielding compared to a few years ago.

  3. Australians USED to OWN Telstra, by virtue of it being (Federal) Government owned.

    Then some bright spark saw a HUGE (and very temporary) Cash Cow and sold it off to the very people that owned it in the first place.

    As a Government owned Public Utility Telstra’s culture and service delivery was underpinned by a legislated community service obligation (CSO) that saw ubiquitous infrastructure roll out.

    Now, (naturally), Telstra as a private company has, as its core objective and focus, shareholder dividend – and that means profit.

    The “best” way to do that is to outsource your call centres who are staffed either by someone you can’t understand or an over scripted robot. Neither have anything to do with Customer Service or sustaining/providing jobs in this country with the obvious beneficial economic knock on effects.

    Telstra as a private company was and is, laughing all the way to the bank because Optus and Vodaphone haven’t a hope in hell of competing across the whole of Australia because Telstra was handed a massive infrastructure advantage. The best the can do is concentrate on the “buck for bang” high population centres.

    Meanwhile, people in the country are left with no option.

    On top of this we have:

    1) Telco’s rolling out their own infrastructure in a country whose area is a vast 7.692 million square kilometers with thousands of remote communities.
    2) The NBN having to buy out Telco’s because some idiot decided FTTN would save money.

    Selling off OUR network has to go down as one of the worst decisions in history and we are paying for it very dearly in so many ways!

    • And don’t forget… Telstra was returning a surplus back into the government coffers before they sold it (like Medibabk Private).

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