SLD10/35 - YOU CAN'T DO IT WITHOUT US DAVID!
This is the leaflet that the CEPU distributed at the Telstra CEO's meeting with some employees held at the Sofitel
YOU CAN'T DO IT WITHOUT US DAVID!
MR THODEY. We guess you’ve got about the most difficult corporate gig in Australia. You have the sharks coming at you from all directions no doubt.
Customer service issues, governance issues, shareholder issues, the NBN rollout and all of its hazards, fierce competition in many segments of the market, quickly changing technology impact and the disastrous Trujillo legacy, etc.
But we have to respectfully remind you that you will not be able to fix many of these issues without the unqualified support of your employees.
At present you do not have that unqualified support.
There is a huge barrier between you and that unqualified support, and that is the management culture, behaviour and incompetence that has existed and still exists.
PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
Take the performance process and performance management process in Telstra. Let us leave the theory and policy aside for the moment and just address the day-to-day practice.
Many managers treat performance management as a weapon to belt their staff around the ears with rather than concentrating on mentoring, training, development, and leading by example.
Many managers want to exercise their “power” as though they run a “fiefdom”.
Management “prerogative” runs riot without proper checks and balances so that employees are punished in their take home pay and in other ways, for issues totally out of their control and often because of incompetence and self interest on the part of the managers.
What sort of a disgraceful system is this that is being perpetuated David? How will you win the unqualified support of your employees whilst your managers (or at least many of them) are getting away with such unacceptable behaviour?
ENTERPRISE BARGAINING
Take another issue David: The current Enterprise Bargaining dispute with most of your unionised employees.
How will you win their unqualified support while your management insists on discriminating against them in terms of their wages, relative to other employees, such as those on Telstra non-union, non-negotiated ECAs?
Please allow us again, respectfully, to remind you of the sad history of this dispute.
Your management team:
· Walked out of the negotiations with CEPU in June 2008 and then refused to negotiate for 12 months, costing the EBA employees a great amount of money.
· Walked out of the talks in order to continue to pursue their decade and a half long project to de-unionise the company.
· Tried to continue to pursue that de-unionisation project by pushing/enticing employees onto their non-union ECA contracts.
· Failed, but then set out to punish the EBA employees for resisting your management’s nasty little project, by offering them thousands of dollars less than employees on ECAs, doing similar work.
As a result of all that David it is likely that this dispute with EBA employees won’t end until they consider that your management’s discrimination against them has stopped.
WHY THE DE-UNIONISATION PROJECT?
Why would a management want to de-unionise a highly unionised company you might ask?
So that eventually they can start to lower the wages and conditions of its employees much more easily.
Just look at the current edict of limiting AWA employees annual pay increase to less than 2% as an example of what can happen to a largely non-unionised workforce.
HOW WILL CHANGE BEGIN?
How will Telstra get the unqualified support of the EBA workforce without this blatant discrimination by the management being eliminated and until the management’s ideological de-unionisation project has ended?
We are sorry David, but no matter how hard you work at it and with the best intentions in the world, you can’t do it without your employees’ unqualified support.
LEN COOPER
Branch Secretary
Communications Union (CEPU)
18 February 2010
