Telstra: "making government look soft"

Shaun Carney
The Age 16 August 2008

"... some sections of corporate Australia seem to think the Government is an easy mark. At the very least, they're keen to try to call the Government's bluff.

Take Telstra, for example. This is not some small widget-maker operating in an industrial estate near Moorabbin airport, it's one of the nation's major companies, at the leading edge of technology and infrastructure delivery. Telstra could not give a toss about the intent of the new Government's industrial relations system, which is skewed towards collective bargaining and restores the rights of unions to represent employees. Leaked internal documents show that it wants to use what's left of WorkChoices to further de-unionise its workforce well into the next decade, while also eschewing an updated enterprise agreement. According to the documents, the company has been working on this strategy since February, well before it embarked upon and then pulled out of negotiations on an enterprise agreement with unions. Under the company's plan, workers who signed non-union deals would get pay increase of up to 22%, while those who opted not to do so would have their pay frozen until late next year and then would receive inferior pay rises.

Even before the documents surfaced, Telstra had declared that it would no longer negotiate with unions and that it would try to keep as many as possible of its 21,000 employees on Australian Workplace Agreements on those individual contracts after they expire in 2012. The company will not allow any of these workers to opt out of their AWAs early in order to be covered by a collective agreement. In other words, it wants to do as much as it can to keep WorkChoices going. This is completely contrary to what Gillard promised would be the spirit and intent of Labor's IR policy before the election. And yet, here is one of the country's signature companies quite blatantly thumbing its nose at the Government which, incidentally, has a mandate and, many would say, an obligation, to ditch the central premises of WorkChoices."

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