You will, within the next few days, be asked by Telstra to vote on their proposed Enterprise Agreement. Telstra is required by law to put their agreement out for a vote of all ‘affected’ employees, before it replaces the current EA – ‘affected’ employees means well over half of those voting are in fact not currently on our EA.
Despite a long period of negotiations with other unions and other bargaining agents, there is, as yet, no agreement on Telstra’s EA and in fact a number of proposals, if adopted would be of serious detriment to employees/union members.
What are these proposals?
- Move To So-called ‘Performance’ Based Pay
- Telstra wants all employees to ultimately be forced on to their so-called ‘performance’ pay system. They have included additional measures in their draft EA to move towards this position as soon as possible.
- One of those measures is to force all new employees on to the so-called ‘Job Family’ section of the EA and prevent them going to the Workstream section which protects them if they do not wish to be on Telstra’s ‘performance’ pay system.
- Telstra’s ‘performance’ pay system is used currently for all employees in the ‘Job Family’ as well as employees on AWAs, ITEAs and other forms of individual employment contracts.
- Telstra’s ‘performance’ pay system means that nothing is negotiated or negotiable, whether it is your pay rate for the job, your pay increases (if any), or your other conditions.
- This is Telstra’s objective for all employees and must be rejected. Telstra’s ‘performance’ pay system is a shonk!
- Forced Redeployment
- You would no longer have the right to choose between redundancy and redeployment. That is there would be forced redeployment/reassignment for employees occupying positions which are declared redundant.
- If Telstra reassigns you to an unsuitable job and you refuse it, you are denied redundancy pay.
- When you are reassigned to a lower paid job you receive no pay increases until you are no longer considered ‘overpaid’.
- When you are reassigned to an unsuitable job, you can’t ‘request’ an appeal until you have been working in that unsuitable job for 3 months. If you are granted an appeal, Telstra do this internally, with no further avenue for appeal of any of Telstra decisions.
- There is nothing to stop Telstra using this process for constructive dismissal (i.e. the employment circumstances you find yourself in, giving you no alternative but to resign). Your appeal rights through the Fair Work Commission are very limited.
- Changes To Emergency Duty/Phone Advice
- Telstra wants to avoid payment of essential customer servicing allowances (on call, emergent, etc), in certain circumstances thus changing the pay arrangements for phone advice.
- This also allows Telstra to get around paying the minimum 3 hours at double time emergency duty entitlement under some circumstances, by changing the intent of emergency duty – in other words, they want to be able to ring you up without any prior warning and only pay 1 hour at double time for the privilege.
TELSTRA’S SO-CALLED ‘PERFORMANCE’ PAY SYSTEM
Telstra wants everyone on its ‘performance’ pay system because it claims that employees on ‘performance’ pay are more productive. They have never advanced one skerrick of evidence to back that claim. Scratch the surface of this claim and what do we find?
In ‘performance’ pay areas, working through breaks, working unpaid overtime, working in one’s own time and cutting corners is widespread and endemic. These things have been represented by the union and by employees over and over again.
Telstra’s own words demonstrate how dictatorial their ‘performance’ system is and we quote:
“…People Managers determine appropriate increases for employees.”
In our view this means the following outcomes affect your pay:
- The band assigned to a role on employment or transfer is at Telstra’s discretion.
- The position in range is at Telstra’s discretion.
- The percentages set in the range are at Telstra’s discretion.
- The performance ratings are at Telstra’s discretion.
- The performance ‘calibrations at Telstra’s discretion.
- The entire ‘merit matrix’ is at Telstra’s discretion.
You can see that from Telstra’s point of view their ‘performance’ system has been and is non-negotiable.
In Telstra’s EA, (Job Family arrangements), even if your performance is classified as ‘satisfactory’ (i.e. rating 3) you may only be guaranteed a 1.5% increase for the year. That is a real pay cut.
Some time ago we surveyed members and other employees about Telstra’s ‘performance’ pay system. Here are some of the comments:
“People on AWAs are being issued with the easier, more simplistic jobs.”
“Their performance based pay increases seem to be based on who you know.”
“Any pay increases… I’ve received have been due to working excessive hours…”
“Short cuts are taken, jobs not finished properly and others have to fix it…”
“Our management are clueless to what we do and are not in a position to judge how we perform our work. It is too open for ‘favourites’ to get better pay.”
We know that the outcomes of the ‘performance’ pay system are controlled by the ‘bell curve’ concept or a distorted ‘bell curve’ concept: Management refer to it as calibrating the outcome. That is, some employees must be allocated to each end of the’ bell curve’ regardless of their real performance. This is reviewed by Management every year and changed at the Management discretion.
We will use every opportunity to expose Telstra’s shonky ‘performance’ pay system.
Currently, about one third of the Telstra workforce is protected from Telstra’s shonky ‘performance’ pay system in the Enterprise Agreement, in the Workstream section of the agreement. The wage underpinning provided by the Workstream arrangements gives considerable leverage to the wages for every other employment arrangement. Without the Workstream arrangements the only way is down with Telstra wages.
Telstra clearly are cutting and running and chancing their arm on this unacceptable EA.
We have to firmly say ‘NO’ to Telstra’s EBA proposals.
Remember, whilst you are getting union information to assist with your decision making, the majority of employees on AWAs, ITEAs and the so-called ‘Job Family’ section of the EA are not union members and therefore they will rely on our efforts to find out the facts so that they are not railroaded by Telstra into voting yes; and voting against their own interests.