Dismembering Telstra The following article was published in "The Guardian", newspaper of the Communist Party of Australia in its issue of Wednesday, March 15, 2000. Contact address: 65 Campbell Street, Surry Hills. Sydney. 2010 Australia. Phone: (612) 9212 6855 Fax: (612) 9281 5795. CPA Central Committee: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> "The Guardian": <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Webpage: http://www.cpa.org.au> Subscription rates on request. ****************************** Telstra's announcement that it will cut a further 16,300 jobs is part of the Howard Government's strategy to privatise the national telecommunications service provider. The Government knows its legislation to privatise outright the remaining publicly-owned 51 percent of Telstra will be blocked in the Senate. by Marcus Browning The tactic is instead to break Telstra up piecemeal by selling its most profitable sections and, where necessary, contracting out its various operations. In this way Telstra as an integrated whole is being dismembered, creating a group of small, isolated service providers that will eventually be dwarfed by the likes of Optus. Widespread staff reductions are central to this break-up strategy, with last week's announcement bringing the number of redundancies to almost 38,000. A large number will come from the closure of Telstra call centres, many of them in country centres with high levels of unemployment. At the same time as the government-appointed Telstra chief executive, Ziggy Switkowski (the former head of Optus), dropped the jobs bomb he also revealed that Telstra has had a record profit year, $2.09 billion, and that its Network, Design and Construction (NDC) division was up for sale. NDC specialises in telecommunications infrastructure and was set up last year, not primarily as means to develop and advance Telstra's technology, but to gain contracts in the private sector. It now has a $1 billion sales tag with the likes of construction giants Leighton or Transfield expected to be given the nod in the bidding. The Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union pointed out that job losses would hit rural areas early with the closure of call centres. "We warned last year that Telstra was moving to close many of its call centres", said the union's Communications Division President, Colin Cooper, "but the company kept denying it had any specific plans to do so. Now they have identified this as a key area for cost savings." He said that most of the employees who worked at the call centres were women who would find it especially difficult to gain other employment. The union had also forecast the NDC sell-off. "We have always anticipated that Telstra would float part or all of NDC, and that they would choose a moment when the share price needed to be shored up. That's what we're seeing now." Mr Cooper stressed that the further loss of staff would inevitably effect service standards. "There is a limit to what you can achieve through automation and working staff harder. "Telstra's customers know this already through the decline in service standards that has occurred since the big job cuts began." -- Leftlink - Australia's Broad Left Mailing List mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.alexia.net.au/~www/mhutton/index.html Sponsored by Melbourne's New International Bookshop Subscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=subscribe%20leftlink Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20leftlink
