Welcome to the future of Austrlian IR.
The unions are pushing their 19th century agenda with 21st century techniques.
They no longer send the boys round to the office, they send an army of bureaucrats for the workplace ombudsman to innundate you with red tape and requests for information, and waste you and you empoyee's time by contacting 19,000 of your staff.
That's what happenning to Telstra. According to the unions they coerced their employees into siging AWAs. In actual fact they offerred their employees huge cash incentives to sign, thereby by looking after their employees alot better than any union. But the unions are not about worker's rights. It's about maintaining, or rather re-gaining, control of the workplace so they can bury their noses in the trough.
Thank god, i mean Howard, that Telstra is run by an American. He wont have Australian management's inbred fear of the 'workers' (read: Union bosses who've never worked a day in their lives). Sol Trujillo will cooperate with the ombusman, and if taken to court will fight all the way.
Australian management should hang their heads in shame that they did not fund a bigger and better ad campaign against the unions. They are about to pay a huge price.
The unions are already getting their way in ways that decreas productivity and reduce our competativeness. See next blog item
