..Bill Shortshrift enterprise bargaining agreement available, apply through Airtasker. Must have ABN. Casuals only.
Telstra’s latest boss Andy Penn (a pommy 457 visa import) has just announced he’s sacking 8000 Australians or a quarter of Telstra’s entire workforce.
It follows Telstra’s February 2017 sacking of 1100 workers, its sacking of 326 customer service jobs in July 2016 and 1100 in 2013. Penn says it’s to cut costs of $2.5 billion over the next four years in his strategy dubbed ‘Telstra 2022’. This is Penn’s calculated retirement date when he can skedaddle back to London with his bundle of performance bonuses and millions in payout.
So Liberal-Labor’s joint privatization of Telstra has amounted to over 20,000 qualified, experienced and decent Australians discarded onto the career-ending and unemployment scrap-heap.
Many have not found a job since, have consequently suffered financial family breakdown. Some have regrettably suicided. But trained and qualified journalists have ignored the personal and social implications; preferring instead to ‘move on’ to the next news story of the day. It’s just like the media ignoring Queensland Nickel‘s 550 sacked workers denied just entitlements.
No tears are deserved for sacked journos.
The 20,000+ workers of Telstra sacked since John Howard’s lying privatisation promise, equates to the following Australian communities of comparable populations being slaughtered by the Japanese had we been invaded in WWII:
- Albany WA pop: 23,300
- Mount Gambier SA pop: 23,000
- Richmond-Windsor NSW pop: 22,700
- Armidale NSW pop: 22,700
- Goulburn NSWpop: 22,600
- Broken Hill NSW pop: 22,300
- Caboolture QLD pop: 21,800
- Queanbeyan NSW pop: 23,800
- Roebourne WA pop: 21,200
- Traralgon, VIC pop: 21,000
- Kawana Waters, QLD pop: 20,200
(2016 statistics)
Meanwhile, Telstra’s elite CEO Andy Penn’s struggling on $2.3 million a year. When his cost cutting bonuses kick in at his performance review, tripple that!
Penn’s corporate prescription follows his predecessor, which preferences shareholders, downgrades customer service, and enslaves employees.
Ex-Telstra chief David Thodey got paid by Australian taxpayers $12 million a year between 2009 and 2015, then after mass sackings took off with a $14.5 million pay cheque. All up, Thodey pocketed $90 million and no longer needs to work. Except rich mate Turncoat gave him the CSIRO chairman gig and last month put him on some review panel into public servant salaries. Thodey is well placed.
And remember adios amigos Sol Trujillo, the 457 visa Mexican bandit? Sol gutted Telstra between 2005 and 2009, hatefully sacking some 10,000 Aussies on his watch to earn personal bonuses, pocketed up to $13 million a year. After grabbing a termination payout of $3.7 million and high tailing back overseas, Sol’s parting shot at the 10,000 sacked Australians recorded in a BBC interview in May 2009 went:
“In many ways (Australia) was like stepping back in time…racism does exist and it’s got to change because the world is full of a lot of people and most economies have to take advantage – including Australia – of a diverse set of people. “If there is a belief that only a certain people are acceptable versus others, that is a sad state.”
Telstra’s demise was sown from 1989 by privatising flog master Labor’s Treasurer Paul Keating who corporatised Telecom Australia and then in 1993 as PM, merged the public owned Overseas Telecommunications Commission with his rebranded ‘Telstra’. Then Keating let Singapore’s SingTel set up Optus to compete against Telstra.
Then the next coffin nail was punched in 1997 when the Liberals’ little Johnny Howard thieved its public asset wealth for the Liberals pet polly projects and flogged it off to mum and dad investors who ended up losing money in their T1, T2, T3 share issues.
No Democratic Right to Sell Public Assets
Labor’s PM Rudd then thought-bubbled in 2007 his National Broadband Network to further undermine Telstra so that by 2100 no Australian child would live without living streaming video for open heart surgery, or something like that.
In February this year, a journo came across a Cabinet in Confidence government document in a filing cabinet at a garage sale revealing that Rudd planned to privatize the NBN.
So Telstra’s boss Andy Penn has reacted to cut out all dead wood, outsource call centres to Third World Manila and Jakarta, and to otherwise automate the whole thing to China’s Huawei and to some massive supercomputer probably also in China.
Then he’s off.
