CEPU : Connecting our community

ECA

(15 January, 2009): Telstra has been trying for over 12 months to get its employees to support its so-called Employee Collective Agreement (ECA), in one form or another.

It has expended enormous effort.

Its entire management structure has been engaged and huge amounts of money have been expended to get about 200 employees (so far) on to its ECA lemon.

Why?

Because they are desperate to get the Part A/Part B non-union ECA up, so that it can implement its plan to cut employee pay and conditions.

How desperate are they?
Are they desperate enough, given their massive effort with so little success so far, that they would stretch and bend the system to get their ECAs up?

Let’s look at the facts so far:

  • Telstra has started dishing out false hope to staff - claiming that after the ECA runs out, Telstra will have to talk to the union about a new agreement under the Federal Government's new laws.  They don't tell you that their ECA will run out in THREE YEAR'S TIME - so you have to live with a terrible deal until Telstra comes back to the negotiating table.
  • We're receiving reports that managers are wrongly claiming that under the law the Telstra Redundancy Agreement will run out in March, 2009.  They are either mis-reading the law - or they are lying.  Following extensive lobbying by the CEPU, the new Government changed the law to help, in part, protect the TRA.
  • The only way you can lose the TRA and its protections is if you vote up an ECA to replace the terms and conditions of the TRA.  You have the power to save your own redundancy agreement.
  • Telstra has constantly refused to let the union or other employees have scrutineers of their ECA ballots, despite the fact that having scrutineers is a normal part of “clean ballot” practice in Australia.
  • Telstra has constantly refused to publish the results of their ECA ballots (e.g. numbers who voted, numbers who voted yes/no, the numbers of informal votes etc), despite the fact that publishing this information is a normal part of “clean ballot” practice in Australia.
  • They have consistently used commercial agency type arrangements to run the ballot, so that rather than an independent government agency controlling the ballot process, Telstra controls the ballot because they are the paying client.
  • Some employees have been placed on an ECA despite the fact that they were not given the opportunity to vote. After the union highlighted the issue, these employees were removed because of what Telstra described as an “administrative error”. How many other “administration errors” have there been?
  • Some ECA ballots have been conducted “on-line” with no voter knowledge of the ballot security and integrity, and no voter knowledge of protections against multiple voting etc.
  • There are no allowances for the fact that many employees still do not have day-to- day online capability or practice, and employees are only given less than 48 hours to vote, in some cases.
  • Some employees, who have been caught up in an ECA ballot, are very angry because they didn’t want an ECA and they voted against it. Sometimes whole work centres have voted against it, but they are still on an ECA at the end of it.
  • They have no say in who is in scope and who is not, they have no chance to debate     the fors and against with others in scope, and no opportunities which would     normally be     considered as part of a democratic process. These employees are in fact forced into an ECA, despite the fact that they want a union-negotiated EBA.
  • In at least one instance (Service Plus, Perth), after employees in Perth and Brisbane (Service Plus, Call Centric), voted against the ECA, only weeks later the Brisbane Call Centric staff were dropped out of the equation, and another ECA ballot was implemented at Perth Call Centric only.
  • In those few weeks, in order to get the ballot up, Telstra Management applied absolutely relentless pressure on those who voted no originally in Perth Call Centric, and even then they only got the ballot up by the narrowest of margins.
  • Telstra Management, in calling for earlier “expressions of interest” in their ECA, required employees to indicate whether they would vote yes, no, or maybe. Whatever happened to the principle of secret ballots? This is another democratic principle that Telstra has trashed.
  • To top it all off, how is it acceptable that a group of employees, (possibly a small group because there is no 50+ voting requirement to get a vote up), can decide on a set of inferior working conditions for future employees (Part B of the ECA), who get absolutely no say in it?
  • How is such behaviour tolerated by the system governing ECAs? If such behaviour is tolerated by the Act, how bad are the WorkChoices laws that Telstra Management love so much? What sort of shonky game is this?