Supported in Australia
The topic for this week centres around essential services. Googling the word ‘essential’ we see descriptions like ‘absolutely necessary’ or ‘extremely important’. If we now take a look at communication systems within Australia, such as Internet, Land Lines and Mobiles it would be hard to argue that these services do not come under the banner of ‘essential’!
Australia will always see its share of natural extremes – from bushfires and drought through to severe storms and floods. This year we also must deal with a world-wide pandemic! Through all these challenges one thing has become very apparent – we are completely stuffed without good communication services!
So – why have we allowed Telstra, our largest Telco to move most of its support call centres offshore? Why should we be facing the current situation of even further reduced service because the Philippines have closed many of their call centres. With a great job done thus far with largely dodging Covid-19 in this country – why do we need to bare the paid of these offshore closures?
I just finished reading that Telstra in conjunction with a call centre hire company called TeleTech are furthering this un-Australian problem by scheduling another 3,500 seat Manila based call centre. TeleTech does not have a great reputation for human rights, fair pay or anything good to do with their employees – but this partnering arrangement is designed to distance Telstra from shame???
COVID-19 has been responsible for massive numbers of Australians losing their jobs – especially in hospitality. Can anyone suggest that some of our own Aussie based hospitality workers would not make awesome Telstra support call workers? I am sure they could become brilliant at this change of occupation very quickly.
The Telstra end game here is simply to save a dollar at the expense of good service and Australian jobs. Our Government should simply make this activity ILLEGAL. Communications within Australia should be considered an essential service and the delivery / support of this service should be done from within Australia.
Imagine if other essential services were allowed to get away with the current un-Australian cost cutting service debacle that Telstra enjoys. Would we see our Police force, Fire brigade, Ambulance Officers & emergency services workers also sourced from the Philippines on a fly-in / fly-out basis? Where does this rubbish stop?
Australia needs to look after itself for a change. Forget free trade, level playing fields, globalisation and all these other idealist anacronyms – they do not work unless we want to embrace the lowest standards of living on the worldwide stage. We need to protect our manufacturing and industries, protect our workers jobs and incomes, protect what standard of living we have left.
We see the exact same low to non-existent levels of service provided to large Australian companies when their bean counters demand that their IT support be outsourced to foreign countries. In the name of saving a few bucks their end users are basically on their own. Every job that we have ‘subbied’ on with these large International IT support companies gets stuffed up from the top down. Now we refuse to have anything to do with these IT jobs.
When will all sides of politics wake up and realise that we ‘were’ the lucky country? We need foreign policy and Australian protection changes made yesterday. Let’s start with communications!
Future Byte Me topics can be emailed to [email protected] and Bruce is contactable at Kerr Solutions, 205 Musgrave Street or on 07 49 222 400.
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