CWU Media ALERT
COMMUNICATION WORKERS UNION, Communications Division, Telecommunications & Services Branch Victoria, a division of the CEPU (Communications Electrical Plumbing Union), representing Telstra, Australia Post, Optus, ESTA and other communications sector employees.
Ref: SLD 16/26 – 5 April 2016
OFFSHORING – ANOTHER WORD FOR EXPLOITATION OF LOW WAGE WORKERS IN OTHER COUNTRIES, AS WELL AS TAX AVOIDANCE.
Optus and Telstra’s blueprint for the future?
480 more Optus jobs to go – and a large proportion of these will be offshored.
“Stop and just think of it for a few short seconds (that’s all you need!) – Telstra – as a privately owned Australian company reliant on the Australian public supporting what was once a publicly owned institution, makes decisions to remove 10,000 jobs from Australia, and replace them with low wage, unscrutinised jobs in countries that have dubious records of workplace health and safety, national security, and human rights. At the same time its record of providing service to Australian telecommunications users is rapidly deteriorating, and network failures and outages are increasing the downtime of the network” John Ellery, Victorian Branch Secretary of the Communications Union said today.
“If this is the future strategy of Telstra that is currently trumpeting their mantra of “faster and fitter”, and becoming an Asia centric business, – it’s time to reverse this strategy urgently.”
“Here’s a few numbers that affect all Australians – 10,000 offshore jobs in Manila and Mumbai don’t pay PAYG income tax to Australia. An average wage of AUD $50,000 for these 10,000 Australian jobs would be providing the Australian government tax coffers with around $150,000,000 per year in income tax receipts. With all this talk about “budget repair” from the conservative politicians, why not start the “repair” ball rolling. On top of that, the contribution by Telstra of payroll tax as a result of those 10,000 jobs to the various State governments should be around 5% of the payroll (some states have a different rate). So payroll tax on 10,000 jobs is around a combined $25 million distributed amongst the States. All this in one Telecommunications company alone.”
“But it’s not just Telstra. It can be multiplied many times when considering all the industries that are playing this game. It’s a philosophy that is rampant in most sectors of Australian industry. We now have an announcement from Optus pushing another 480 jobs out of its workforce. It would appear that just about any large company in Australia with a large number of staff on the payroll is looking to avoid tax in one way or another. The recent exposure of some large Australian companies and individuals utilising “dodgy” tax avoidance methods is rapidly becoming the norm. A very recent Four Corners program based on leaks from a legal firm in Panama (Mossack Fonseca) confirms the practice of using “tax havens” (eg British Virgin Islands and others) to hide away profits and avoid paying taxes to their home Governments. It is, quite frankly, disgraceful, shameful, and needs swift action from various sovereign Governments around the world to begin to stop this cancer of many vulnerable workforces.”
” In order to stamp out this anti Australian worker strategy, our politicians, particularly in an election year, need to act now. There needs to be a “carrot and stick” approach – penalties applied to Australian companies if they offshore, and inducements through the tax system if they either return previously offshored, or maintain, Australian based jobs” Mr Ellery concluded.