The Guardian 17 May, 2006
At Optus, it’s divide and conquer
For ten years Jim [not his real name] worked for Optus as an on-call shift worker installing digital TV, high speed data and telephones. Last month he and another 30 technicians were told they were to lose their jobs. Jim told his story to The Guardian.
I’ve been working there close to ten years. We are on a wages and work under an EBA which we vote for.
Because we are such a small group, what we find is that we don’t have much strength because 95 per cent of Optus people are in-house.
We are all under an agreement. It’s very non-union because the way they’ve structured it.
All the equipment is owned by Optus.
I’m a shift worker and I’m also on call. They can send information via computer down to your data terminal in your van. There are penalty rates for shift work but they haven’t changed in ten years.
We were at the building for training for a couple of weeks. Rumours were circulating that were going to lose our jobs.
Then, they basically told us that 30 techs are going to be missing, are being made redundant, we are downsizing and all that.
We’ve gone back for a meeting to find out what’s going on and they told us after all this time [about the job cuts]. But you won’t know until another two weeks who it was going to be.
You know we work on power lines and all that stuff, under houses and roofs and it’s stressful.
So we had to stay at work for another two weeks once we found out on April 28. Some people had WorkCover injuries, some people had problems with management; most of them have had a run in with the management.
So 28 people are to go and about 35 are left in our group.
There is plenty of work
But what they’ve offered us when we got retrenched one on one with the manager, if you choose to come back to work you can work as a contractor for Stream. [Stream is a body-hire company].
They wouldn’t even give us paperwork about it when we went to see them. Most blokes are not taking it up, I don’t think any are actually, because of the conditions.
Your work is unsafe when you are working on your own. When you work for a company you have an ability to ask for help if you need help to work on a two-storey house, or whatever it may be.
You wouldn’t be an employee of that new company — you would be a contractor.
You’ll be providing your own sick leave, holidays, insurance. Like a little mini-business of your own. You’ll work for them and they will delegate the work for you.
The reason I think they’d like Optus techs to go in there is because we are so skilled at doing the job. And contractors are not trained up yet.
As we were getting fired, in the next room they were training contractors in the office building.
This is what hurt people the most. Rumours were that there was no work but there’s plenty of work. They are just downsizing. I think it’s got to do with the structure of the company.
The way it’s been structured under the new laws [WorkChoices] they can do what they’ve done now. We were hoping to get something more concrete on paperwork when going into contract but they haven’t given us any so we can’t prove anything.
They didn’t give us enough work for weeks to make it look like that. But there is plenty of work out there.
They probably held the work back just to get this procedure going because we all have to get our vans in — there is a lot of procedure.
Optus is not going to supply vans anymore. You can lease a van out.
I think they are hoping that a lot of us will go to Stream to work as contractors because of our five to ten-year experience.
We are keeping our tools, they gave us all our tools as a "thank you very much". I can start tomorrow if I want to.
If tools break down we supply our own.
Telstra works on one thing at a time; Optus people have three products so there is a lot of work involved, a lot of gear to carry.
Optus is not highly unionised. Some workers are in the union, some are not.
They’ve done it very well to keep the union out.
We work under a KPI — Key Performance Indicator — where you get allocated so much work for so many points.
You have to get those points. For instance, you have to have three installs a day to get your points or you might do something else to get them. The more points you get, the better you look. And they sack people based on that criteria because they haven’t achieved the almost impossible.
You have to take shortcuts to reach these targets, which all come down to safety.
People are really stressed not knowing who was going to go and who was going to stay.
And if you are under this sort of stress and working under power lines, under houses and on roofs — you are not thinking straight. There were no accidents but that was down to good luck.
They say you can make $2000 a week [under a Stream contract], some are saying $7000. This is rubbish, by the time you’d pay for your tools, your insurance. The younger blokes get in and get out in 12 months because the workload is huge.
So people go in and work their butts off for seven days or nights a week for a huge income. But all you are doing is putting yourself in danger. Putting a cable across roads at Optus you had a second person. In contracting you just hope that the traffic doesn’t come down on you!
Or working on a two-storey house in harnesses. This is a safety procedure at Optus you had to comply with.
With contractors safety is just finished.
If you join up with somebody you’ll have to split your money in half.
There has always been quite a lot of overtime in the past. We work on penalty rates, we work on Saturday for nothing really but you get the Monday off at Optus. Sundays are basically 70 per cent rating and you get another Monday off.
Optus policy is divide and conquer, that’s how it has always worked.