Mike Symon (Deakin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I speak in support of this private member’s motion moved by the member for Page. I certainly note her great concern about further job cuts at Telstra. It is also good to be able to come into a debate and listen to those on the other side actually talking about an issue that I care greatly about. It seems that we are in agreement on this issue. That is a good thing. As we all know, Telstra is a very large Australian employer. The jobs that it provides, and the skills that it fosters and grows, keep Australia competitive in telecommunications. The research it does is top rate, it has talented staff and it has second to none ownership of telecommunications assets. That, of course, is quite well-known now that we are debating the NBN in another forum here. But, in terms of job cuts, Telstra does not perform so well. I really wonder about the future of a company like Telstra when its priority seems to be stripping away the good parts of the company so that there is really only a shell left.

This seems to come down to Telstra management. We now have a new set of managers at Telstra following on from Sol Trujillo and his American amigos—I think that was the right description for them when they were here. Telstra has been going backwards the whole while. Even worse than that, the workers and customers who use that company are usually the last to find out this news. Imagine if you were an employee and you found out about the future, or not, of your job through the newspaper. I do not think that is a very fair and reasonable way of dealing with employees—telling the share market first and the employees later. I do not think that really builds company morale.

Many times over many years this has been the fate of Telstra staff. You can see why morale slips in a large company when that becomes the modus operandi. On 1 October this year the Australian Financial Review reported Telstra plans to slash 15 per cent of its workforce, cutting over 6,000 jobs, for a planned total redundancy cost of close to $600 million. The paper also went on to report that thousands more jobs would go through natural attrition, thereby making the rate of job cuts similar to that experienced under the last Telstra CEO, Sol Trujillo. Of course, this was the very same person being paid $13 million a year and who left with a payout of $3.76 million after throwing those 12,000 employees on the scrapheap. Telstra’s project, dubbed Project New, is apparently about cutting jobs and yet increasing services. I think that the jobs that they are planning to cut are actually the jobs that provide the services.

With Telstra going through another round of job cuts, we see managers claim they have achieved various goals. But I really feel for the Telstra staff at the sharp end of that, the ones who will go. It is not upper management that goes in these rounds of job cuts; it is staff on the front line. These staff, as I have said before, are the ones with the skills; these are the people you need to talk to if you phone up. If you have a fault, you need them to come out and fix your service. They are the ones at the front line of job cuts. Call centres are no different. Call centres in regional areas particularly provide local jobs that are badly needed in many cases. My electorate of Deakin is totally suburban but it is a huge calamity when we have factory closures and lose a hundred jobs. I cannot even begin to imagine how bad that could be in a regional town. It would be enormous. As Len Cooper, national president of the CEPU Communications Division, observes:

Every Telstra CEO has used mass redundancies and promised greater efficiency and better customer service and they haven’t achieved it, so why haven’t they learned a lesson?

I do not know why they have not.  I can say they should listen to their customers, they should listen to their workers and they should—as a large employer—show some real corporate and social responsibility and look after the towns and cities that they serve, not only in terms of direct phone lines but also in terms of back-up services and support, so that when customers need it they can talk to a real person and can have their problems fixed easily and quickly and be back on the line.

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