As many as 1000 customer contact jobs, largely in regional Australia, are likely to be lost as a result of changes to Telstra call centre contracts.
Outsourcing companies Salmat and Vertex have both announced that they have lost their contracts with Telstra in the course of a new round of tendering it is undertaking.
Salmat provides customer contact services to Telstra from a number of call centres in urban and regional Australia, some of which are solely dependent on the Telstra contract for their viability.
The company said call centres in Wagga Wagga (NSW), Bundaberg (Qld) and Geelong (Vic) would all have to close unless new contracts could be secured.
The Wagga Wagga centre employs 142 people, Bundaberg 107 and Geelong 163. A further 330 jobs will be lost from Salmat’s Surry Hills branch in Sydney.
Vertex’s operations in East Bentleigh, Victoria, employ 750 people, some 250 of whom are now at risk of losing their jobs.
Telstra has made no announcement about its plans for this work, but unions have warned that it is likely many if not all of these jobs will go overseas. Telstra has confirmed that at least one of the companies shortlisted in the tender is based outside Australia.
National approach needed
The move once again highlights the vulnerability of call centre workers and others whose jobs can readily be transferred off-shore in the digital era. It also suggests how public subsidies to companies in the form of federal, state and local government support are not in themselves enough to protect workers and local economies against such moves.
Salmat was one of a number of telco-related companies which received state and local government support to set up in regional areas during the last decade. AAPT, whose Bendigo (Vic) call centre has haemorrhaged jobs since it was set up in 2000, was another.
The CEPU is opposed to the off-shoring of Australian jobs and believes that a national approach, including federal legislation that creates disincentives to off-shoring, is needed to counteract this trend.
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