The following articles were published by The Guardian, newspaper of the Communist Party of Australia, in its issue of February 4th, 2004.
Reproduction of articles, together with acknowledgement if appropriate, is welcome. The Guardian, 65 Campbell Street, Surry Hills, Sydney 2010 Australia. Editor: Anna Pha Communist Party of Australia, 65 Campbell Street, Surry Hills. Sydney. 10 Australia. General Secretary: Peter Symon Phone (02) 9212 6855 Fax: (02) 9281 5795 Email CPA [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Guardian [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscription rates are available on requests. ************************************************************************* Telstra Playing with workers lives by Mike Newman Telstra are throwing hundreds of IT workers out of their jobs and are trying to pass the blame on to their suppliers. However, the facts are clear - Telstra have actively manoeuvred to achieve millions of dollars in cost savings and have put in place a strategy of transferring IT development and support jobs from Australia to the city of Bangalore in India. The recent reports of Telstra having clean hands when their IT supplier IBM decided to shift jobs to India are false to the core. What is not coming across in media reports is the fact that most of the job losses will fall on long-term Telstra employees who were transferred to IBM in 1997. This is a classic outsourcing operation - loyal workers shunted from what should have been a secure job in the public sector, first to a multinational services firm and then onto the scrap heap. Having sold their workforce like serfs to IBM, Telstra are now complicit in getting IBM to sack them. Telstra like to paint themselves out of the picture - it is just up to their suppliers how they choose to staff or respond to contract requests. But just check back some months and we find Telstra actively courting Indian IT supplier Infosys. In September 2003, they awarded Infosys a US$50 million contract for systems maintenance threatening up to 180 outsourced IT jobs at IBM. At this time Infosys boasted that they expected more contracts to come there way. More recently, Infosys bought up the Australian company Expert Information Services for $31 million, just when Expert is in the middle of negotiations to renew a contract with Telstra for maintenance of its Customer Relationship Management systems. What a coincidence! Telstra pressure drives contractors offshore The Infosys web-site is pretty proud in showing off Telstra's Chief Information Officer Jeff Smith's role in helping promote Infosys in Australia. Telstra management are using Infosys and other offshore IT outfits as a means of destroying hard won working conditions, smashing wage rates, and keeping the union out. At the same time it divides workers, pitting Australian workers against workers in India in an attempt to drive down the wages and conditions of Australian workers. Infosys is a massive global player with over 20,000 employees, up from almost 14,000 at the beginning of 2002. Profits and growth are frankly incredible - a phenomenal profit of US$246 million on revenue of US$1 billion and year-on-year revenue growth of almost 40 percent. This compares to an established international Consulting services company Accenture, with 83,000 employees, reports two percent revenue growth and only US$550 million profit on US$13 billion of sales. By forcing down wages and conditions, Infosys is growing 20 times faster with a profit rate at 25 percent or three times greater than a traditional and representative competitor. This a job-wrecking juggernaut on the path of super-exploitation and super-profits with Telstra forcing the pace. It is clear that Telstra has been the key player in putting IBM and IT service providers under pressure, any attempts to look like an independent customer being offered a bargain is hypocrisy in the extreme - if anything they have forced the pace by courting, even advertising, Infosys, and forcing suppliers to search off-shore for cheaper labour if they want any chance of competing for a Telstra contract. This is Telstra's reward to highly qualified and dedicated IT staff who have served the company for years. But the plot thickens even more! On January 21 the Sydney Morning Herald reported that Telstra had set up a joint venture with Satyam - yet another India-based IT supplier, this time to move the development and support of Telstra's data warehousing (reporting and analytical functions) to, you've guessed it, Bangalore. This time hundreds more locally based jobs, currently performed by consulting group Delloites, will come under the axe. Manufacturing workers in the rich and industrialised world are used to seeing their jobs transferred offshore. Public sector workers, particularly in unskilled local government jobs, have seen their jobs contracted out cost-slashing transnationals determined on making a profit by attacking workers' wages and working conditions. No worker safe But this attack on a sector of skilled professional office workers will send a chill through millions of relatively well-paid and highly qualified workers. On January 20 the Sydney Morning Herald reported that "According to some industry analysts, up to two million highly skilled IT jobs in the US will be outsourced to low-cost countries over the next decade." Even Howard's government is stuck for a response - Costello gets on ABC radio to beg Telstra to reconsider, while Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Daryl Williams flatly contradicts him. Williams's spokesperson thought outsourcing a grand idea. She was reported as saying, "Australia has much to gain from selective outsourcing of ICT services overseas, both from enhanced productivity and as a provider of high-end services". Which section of the Australian workforce that Williams thought would benefit from losing their livelihood wasn't made clear however! Of course even Costello is forgetting that he had been fully briefed by Telstra on the Sanyan joint venture. He obviously felt it politically expedient to forget this while ticking Telstra off on the radio. And after IT, what else could follow - incredibly, call centres have already started to relocate, and apparently with some sophistication. Call Centre workers in low-wage economies are often trained to speak and sound like they are from the client country - some even begin their shifts with a discussion on the news in the place they are meant to be working. Union members will know of the dreadful working conditions imposed on call-centre workers in Australia - we can only wonder about conditions in India or the Philippines, the most popular destinations for off-shoring. In an article on offshore outsourcing of call centres TechRepublic (an IT Web-Magazine) compares labour costs and explains that "..the fully loaded per-agent cost in a US call center averages $40,000 per year; in India, it is only between $5,000 and $10,000". Trade union campaigns Basically, in the age of the Internet and cheap communications no job is really safe. Consider Accounting, Human Resources, Advertising, Client Relations, Logistics - there is no special reason for the profit-hungry to keep any costly back-office department at head-office when they can ship the job off to any company or country that charges a fraction of the cost. Up to now union membership by IT workers has been patchy, mainly because job security and relatively high wages were almost guaranteed. Many developers and support staff opted out of full-time work to go onto short-term but well paid contract work - with contracts typically lasting 3-12 months and usually being renewed. With the dotcom crash and slipping confidence in all things IT and now job competition on a global labour market, life has turned into a very ugly opposite. Union reps and shop-stewards who have stopped trying to recruit IT workers are now much more likely to find a receptive audience. Defending IT jobs helps defend our administration, distribution, call centres and other areas that bosses are targeting for cost savings. The threat of off-shoring provides trade unions a new opportunity to recruit and build in the IT area. The NSW Labor Council's IT Workers' Alliance is a great example of focussing on IT workers, and taking up their specific problems - recruitment agencies, contracts, unpaid overtime. This could be the basis of campaigns that draw workers into the union and help them defend themselves when the employers attack. ************************************************************************* -- Visit the proposed Leftlink web site at http://www.leftlink.net/ -- Leftlink - Australia's Broad Left Mailing List mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Archived at http://www.cat.org.au/lists/leftlink/ Sponsored by Melbourne's New International Bookshop Sub: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsub: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
