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?
We find that in order to meet management decided unrealistic targets, employees work unpaid overtime, work through breaks, work in unpaid ‘travel to work’ time, cut corners on good (and safe) work practices and customer service, and find various ways to “meet” targets rather than do the job properly.
These unacceptable behaviors are driven by managers who get stripes and rewards for the “team” performance.
But the situation is even worse than this.
In the “rating” process managers play favorites for various reasons, making discrimination and other unfair treatment widespread.
What is more the whole situation becomes a farce because it is driven by the “bean counters” in the final analysis, which means that no one, or very, very few get just rewards because its all about the company’s “bottom line”.
In fact the system is corrupted as various means are used to “produce” a set of figures that are designed to impress the bean counters, but are not about real performance.
In the final analysis the Management want their so-called performance based pay system because it releases them from any need to negotiate with unions and employees over their pay rate, their pay increases and their conditions just like has been (and is) for employees on AWAs, ITEAs and other forms of individual contracts, and just like it is for employees on the so called “Job Family” section of the enterprise agreement.
Currently, about one third of the Telstra workforce are protected from Telstra’s shonky “performance pay” system in the Enterprise Agreement, in the Workstream section of the agreement.
In its proposal for a new agreement Telstra wants to stop any new employees from going on to the Workstream section of the agreement, in effect phasing out that protection over time thus leaving all employees abandoned to their shonky “performance” pay system.
Telstra clearly are about to ‘cut and run’ and chance their hand on this unacceptable EBA.
We have to firmly say “NO” to Telstra’s EBA proposals.