Customer Service Delivery: Assurance
Telstra has notified the CWU that it intends to proceed with the proposed reorganisation of Assurance functions in Customer Service Delivery (CSD).
Telstra has advised that implementation will involve some modifications to its proposal, with the number of redundancies reduced as a result of some natural attrition that has occurred since the proposal was developed.
As a result of consultation, one additional Band 3i Business Specialist role has also been created. This role will report to the Systems Enablement team to continue application support and service maintenance and will be based in the Stirling Street Perth.
On 16 November, the CWU met with Telstra for a second time over this issue. The meeting was also attended by the CPSU with both unions providing feedback from membership consultations held over the last week.
The CWU told Telstra that on the basis of both membership feedback and its own analysis, it believed that Telstra has underestimated the impact that its proposal would have on service quality and reliability.
The vulnerability of the Townsville centre to extreme weather events is an obvious issue.
But unions also reported that members were already overstretched and often working unpaid overtime, especially during peak load periods.
And that’s before any further reduction of staffing levels.
In light of such membership information, the CWU argued that the proposal should be trialled for several months before any implementation decision was made. Staggering the implementation of the proposal to allow progressive monitoring of its impacts was also discussed.
Telstra now says that as part of implementation it will monitor the impacts of the changes and consult with the CWU in early February on its findings. Full implementation is scheduled for March 2016.
In the meantime, members should not be working unpaid overtime and should report any management pressure to do so to their state branch immediately.
