Thread: What's your view on this?

Warning. Not much to do with Land Rovers!!!

I am quite curious to know what, as Australians (mainly), your view is on this?

The article was extracted from our monthly union newsletter, but it's been on the news a bit over the past couple of months. The gist that Visionstream, an Australian company, has won a support contract and are taking over a large part of the telecomms maintenance work. To keep costs down they are sacking all the workers and requiring them to buy their own equipment and tender to work instead. Many of these guys have never been self-employed and have never had to provide their own equipment and just as many have been employed in the same field for up to 30 years.

3 Telecom workers need your support

The EPMU is currently fighting a very important industrial campaign against Telecom and Visionstream. This fight is not only important for the workers concerned, it is important for all NZ workers. This is because this is the first renewed attempt by NZ employers to unilaterally force workers to become dependent contractors. This process strips workers of basic wages, conditions and work rights.

Right now nearly 600 Telecom lines engineers in Auckland and Northland are faced with being made redundant and then having to buy their jobs back. That’s because Telecom’s new Australian contractor Visionstream has decided to remove their employment rights and make them dependent contractors.

That means they’d need to stump up with up to $60,000 to buy their own vans and tools and face a loss of income of 50-66% or leave the industry. But they are fighting back through strike action and by refusing to sign up to the contracts.

That’s not easy to do and it means many of them are facing serious financial hardship. You can help them win their fight against Telecom and Visionstream by donating to the Telco strike fund.

The simple fact is that if Telecom wins this fight, other employers will follow suit (and it could be your members next). That is why this is not just an EPMU fight, it is a union wide fight. As such, we need your industrial and financial support.

Telecom is currently making hundreds of workers redundant as part of their campaign to force workers to sign the dependent contractor agreements, and while the workers are united, financial pressures will be increasing over the next few weeks. As such, the EPMU workers need as much financial support as possible.

The EPMU has established a donation line (0900 STAND TALL) that provides an automatic $10 donation to the campaign.

We need to get this info out to the 350,000 union members across the country and we need your help to do this. We also need any other offers of support or assistance that your union or organisation can provide.

The CTU Organising Centre in Auckland is part of the EPMU campaign and will be coordinating the assistance and support that other unions can provide the EPMU. As such, I will be in touch with individual unions (particularly here in Auckland) over the next few days about how we can all support this important fight.

Thanks again.
Chris Flatt
National Campaign Organiser
NZ Council of Trade Unions - Te Kauae Kaimahi

Originally Posted by p38arover

Isn't Visionstream part of Telstra?

Telstra did the same to their own phone install staff years ago - then, after they bought vans and equipment, didn't give them any work.

I worked for NDC when it first split from Telstra and then Skilled Communications.
Telstra used to tender out the contracts for a region of a certain type of work. They would say it was for xx million dollars but problem was that they didn't actually have to supply any work. You just got the contract for the region and got whatever work they decided to do in that region on that equipment.
As a result NDC returned as part of Telstra as no one would buy it and Skilled Communications went under along with who knows how many others.
It's a big load of crap. Nearly 100% of our work came from Telstra but it meant Telstra passed on the downtime/losses etc to some other poor fool.