This is interesting. Australia’s biggest telco Telstra has announced it will lose 900 operations employees saying technology has made the roles redundant.
Staff were called to meetings yesterday to be told of the potential cuts, which affects employees in the operations team, responsible for installing and maintaining the telco’s infrastructure networks.
It has the union puzzled who say that customer service willbe affected by the cuts, equating to one in 16 of operational staff despite Telstra’s new chief executive, David Thodey, having a big drive on to improve customer service.
Wonder if those jobs will go offshore?
I hope those jobs don’t go.
Telstra has always had it tough. Australia is a huge territory with a relatively small population thus they’ve had to have infrastructure all over the place.
Trying to cut costs by removing a huge portion of the team that maintains that infrastructure seems rather shortsighted though I suppose it depends on the circumstances.
The numbers needed for rolling out are much higher than the number of employees needed to simply maintain the infrastructure. However, it’s always best to do this sort of thing slowly. Firstly, the media is less likely to get wind of it. Secondly, you don’t have people looking over your shoulder waiting to tell you “I told you so”. Thirdly, you can retract a lot more easily if things do go wrong.
Here’s hoping their new CEO does a better job of this in the future.
Given the difference between NZ and Australian wages, maybe some of those jobs could be outsourced to out of work Telecom employees in Papakura and Christchurch.
Anyone out there keen to broker the deal?
The poor Australians. I collaborate with few and they’re always having problems. Disconnections, faulty data etc etc and it’s almost always Telstra’s fault.
Of course, Australia went the same we did in turning Telstra into a corporation that runs for profit rather than being a community service so it’s not really all that surprising that they’re having the same problems we are.