Telstra is preparing to offer its staff non-union enterprise agreements in a secret strategy aimed at saving the company $50 million over the next three years, confidential documents show.
The documents show the company is set to put the union-busting agreements to staff in coming weeks, targeting areas with low unionisation rates, Fairfax reports.
Cost savings worth as much as $50 million, enough to pay chief executive Sol Trujillo and his senior executives for a year, are expected to come from shifting more employees onto individual performance pay, introducing a productivity blitz for technicians, and reducing payroll tax liabilities.
The documents, obtained by Fairfax, reveal Telstra has a plan to use non-union employees and outside labour if staff take industrial action.
The documents, prepared to brief Telstra executives, also show the company drew up plans for the agreements before starting negotiations with unions on a collective agreement.
ACTU secretary Jeff Lawrence said the documents showed management had an agenda to use the former government's Work Choices to sideline unions and cut workers' pay and conditions.
"In a classic business strategy of divide and conquer, Telstra management intends to pick off workers section by section to impose a non-negotiable company pay offer," Mr Lawrence told Fairfax.
"It is appalling that one of Australia's largest and most profitable companies can engage in this sort of dishonest and unethical business behaviour."
Mr Lawrence called on the federal government to urgently replace Work Choices with laws giving workers legal rights to bargain collectively and be represented by unions.
Telstra media spokesman Martin Barr, responding to the Fairfax report, said that without having seen the documents referred to, he believed it was the same model Telstra put on the table with unions.
That model "aims to secure significant incentive-based productivity gains over time while offering guaranteed pay increases to our employees and preserving their terms and conditions," he said.
"Of course we have contingencies for industrial action because we need to maintain essential telecommunications services to Australia," Mr Barr said.
"Let me make this very clear that any collective agreement would have nothing to do with AWAs or WorkChoices and our employees would get to vote on it.
"It will be entirely consistent with Labor Party policy and the law," Mr Barr said.
