After close to a year of negotiations, a new Silcar (now Visionstream) Telecommunications Enterprise Agreement is nearing finalisation.
Bargaining for this new agreement was initiated by the company in late 2015, with the CWU becoming involved in January 2016.
Since that time we have seen the rejection by employees in May of one proposed agreement and a swathe of redundancies in mid-year.
Finalisation of a reworked agreement has been recently delayed by the need to have the new draft vetted for compliance with the federal government’s building codes and by some technical difficulties that have arisen around the tax treatment of allowances.
At this stage no firm date has been set for a vote on the new agreement but if the outstanding matters can be resolved the company is hoping to hold a ballot by mid-November.
If it is supported by employees, the agreement will include back pay from 30 December 2015.