Telstra faults: Axings behind mobile coverage blunders
The Herald Sun. Ashley Argoon – March 24, 2016
TELSTRA workers have warned widespread outages will become “a regular occurrence” as Australia’s biggest telecommunications company reels from four national failures in 43 days.
Sweeping job cuts of experienced workers have been pinpointed as the reason behind the national network blunders, impacting millions of customers nationwide.
“We’re going to see (outages) more often,” a Telstra worker said.
“It’s going to become a regular occurrence and most people where I work think it will be a regular occurrence.”
In two years alone, the Communication Workers Union estimates 500 technicians at Telstra’s Global Operations Centre in Clayton have been made redundant.
Telstra claims four national network outages — two in the past week alone — were caused by separate issues.
But it could not answer how a company, with an impeccable track record, had repeatedly failed its customers in the past two months.
“Any suggestion that these incidents are related to changes in our workplace is simply wrong,” a Telstra spokesman said, we believe we have the right workforce in place to maintain our network.”
But its staff say ruthless job cuts have made it more difficult to diagnose and repair faults.
In the past two years alone, the Communication Workers Union estimates 500 technicians at Telstra’s Global Operations Centre in Clayton have been made redundant — more than 40 per cent of its workforce.
Another eight workers are currently facing the axe at Clayton.
“There’s been a decline year by year and each year I think, ‘It can’t possibly get worse than this’, and it does,” a staff member said.
“The morale is so low, we all know what the problems are — the network really is in disarray.
“How it was and what it is now is a disgrace really.”
CWU Victoria secretary John Ellery said there had been a “constant bleeding of redundancies” with the state union receiving redundancy notices from Telstra every single week.
“The underlying cause of this is Telstra has taken a significant amount of its high level tech staff and pushed their functions offshore,” Mr Ellery said.
Telstra would conduct a major review into the outages and was “committed to redoubling our efforts on resilience in the network”.
Two free data days have been offered in a bid to appease furious customers, the next on April 3.