Comment by Liam Gash
There is a widespread dislike and suspicion amongst AOTC's employees of its perceived "American management". This may partly be due to anti-American sentiment or the desire to find a scapegoat for the constant threat of redundancy and reorganisation.
The current dispute in AOTC over more proposed job cuts has given rise to such popular slogans as: "Raise tariffs on imported managers", and "Cut imports: send Blount back". (Frank Blount is the former AT&T boss, now chief executive officer of AOTC.)
The importation of managers is a symptom of the changing attitudes of politicians and bureaucrats to industrial relations and to the nature of public business enterprises. As such it is worth closer examination.
a) Many of AOTC's top managers are North Americans (including one Canadian).
b) This has largely come about because both major political parties and top management in the Department of Transport and Communications see "free enterprise competition" as the best of all possible worlds, the only antidote to creeping socialism, and the only way to achieve a dynamic, forward-thinking and modern telecommunications system.
c) The Liberal/National Party method to achieve this would be to sell off AOTC to the highest bidder and have complete, open competition in the industry (even though their will only ever be one national fibre-optic telecommunications network).
d) The Federal Labor government's method to achieve this has been to sell the debt-ridden AUSSAT embarrassment to establish a telecommunications competitor and turn AOTC over to American managers who are, by definition, the most experienced and able supporters of "free enterprise competition" managers. This means that, in effect, we achieve the same result as in (c) without the hassle of an ALP internal battle over privatising Telecom.
e) This last point is illustrated by recent changes in AOTC management style, particularly since January when Frank Blount took over as CEO. These changes have included:
- ignoring ongoing negotiations over the introduction of new technology and proceeding to apply to the Industrial Relations Commission to alter the Award covering technicians, without any prior discussions with respondent unions.
- the discontinuation of any attempt to match redundancies to any particular change in work organisation or technology; instead arbitrary numbers of jobs to abolish are pulled
- attempts to intimidate and threaten staff through attacks in the media on their standard of work, their inability to change with changing circumstances, leading ultimately to attacks on their job security.
f) The USA is home to exotic and fundamentalist religions. This is nowhere more apparent that in the area of business management. The articles of faith of this new religion can not be challenged:
- that a company can only concern itself with its "core business". anything outside the core business (in our case, looking after the network) should be sold off or contracted out.
- that a job done by contract labour must at all times be better than a job done by an employee.
- that the services provided by a public monopoly must at all times be better delivered by one or more private companies (private monopolies/oligopolies).
- that only services that are profitable should be provided.
g) The USA has the most inefficient and expensive telephone system of any first world country. The breaking up of the Bell monopoly into many regional companies has led to:
- a system in which you might have to be connected by three or more operators through three or more phone companies to make a call from the other side of the US to the other.
- a system where you may pay a long distance price to call a few blocks away because the destination of your call is in another phone company.
- a proliferation of small long distant companies reselling time on other phone companies' lines, adding unnecessarily to the cost of calls.
- an absolute poverty of research and development.
- at the time of the break-up of the private telecommunications monopoly in 1984, AT&T had 43 managers per 100 non-management employees. Today the figure is 84 managers per 100 employees.
- in the same period there have been large increases in "total phone costs" for non-business customers, with decreases for business, particularly big business.
h) For all the these reasons, the staff and unions do not think that the US phone system is in any sense a model. We should be extremely cautious about handing over the control of our system to xecutives or to people who support these kinds of ideas.
i) There are alternatives to the job cuts proposed. There are many services and products which AOTC's skilled work force are able to develop, market and sell.
In some areas staff have taken it on themselves to go out into the community, seek out areas where their skills can be employed, and meet those needs. One small such area is the installation of TV antennas. In many rural areas this is a service for which you may have to wait months and pay extraordinary fees. Where this has been attempted by Telecom staff, in conjunction with TV aggregation, it has been a cost-efficient and profitable venture. Corporate management's "core business" religion has ruled out any such innovative ventures.
The Telecom business offices that are currently on the chopping block could be turned into the public face of a dynamic company marketing modern technology. These offices could accept payment of bills for Telecom, and other government departments on a contract basis. They could sell a wide range of phone equipment, faxes, modems, computers etc, which could then be installed and maintained by AOTC staff. We ask only to be given a chance.
The central problem threatening the telecommunications system is government policy. There needs to be a grassroots campaign to re-establish the worth of public services in public hands.
[Liam Gash is publications officer of the NSW branch of ATEA/ATPOA.]