Chris Barton: Concerns for telco workers all too real

The $5 million-man took out an A3-sized advertisement in the Herald this month to put the record straight.

Telecom chief executive Paul Reynolds said there had been a lot of publicity that was "misleading, factually incorrect or plain mischievous".

He wasn't talking about the obscene size of his pay package.

His pay includes a $3 million performance incentive. It is neither factually incorrect nor mischievous to say that he's getting this incentive in a year when Telecom's annual net profit fell 44 per cent to $398 million.

It's simply putting the record straight - a $3 million incentive for overseeing a drop in profit. Good job.

Reynolds' big ad set out to convince us that his union-busting scheme for Auckland and Northland would be good for consumers.

Not surprisingly, the plan to turn service technicians into owner-operators hasn't gone down well.

These are people who earn around $45,000 a year. In other words, you could pay 112 of them with Reynolds' pay.

The technicians are rightly concerned that the new offer put before them is unfair in that it doesn't guarantee any base level of work, requires them to be avilable 7am-7pm making them dependent - rather than independent - contractors, and reduces their income to around $25,000.

"Claims that there will be across-the-board pay cuts for owner-operators are rubbish," says Reynolds in his advertisement.

He goes on to show what the new overall service provider, Visionstream, is putting on the table for the contractors - including a $3000 set-up grant and a three-year interest-free loan.

What he ignores in his haughty, high-handed dismissal of the workers' concerns is the advice from lawyer Peter Castle to the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union (EPMU) about the draconian, restrictive and unfair terms of the contract - and analysis by Acura Accountants, which provides an estimate of earning capacity using the Visionstream charging codes.

Such concerns may be "rubbish" to someone earning $5.4 million, but for people in the real world trying to earn a decent living, the prospect of a 50-60 per cent pay cut must be devastating.

What's even more insulting is that Reynolds claims the new set-up will result in better service for consumers. Yeah, right.

Reynolds bangs on about how much money Telecom is spending on improving its network. What he neglects to say is that the reason it's having to spend so much is that that network is in a disastrous state because of more than a decade of underinvestment.

Not to mention Telecom's disastrous investment in the wrong mobile-phone technology, which it has also belatedly put right.

For years this rapacious monopoly has held the country to ransom, taking excessive profits while underinvesting in maintenance and improvements.

So much so that National now realises the only way we're going to get decent broadband here is through a multibillion-dollar government investment in new infrastructure that we are all going to have to pay for.

Telecom now wants to underinvest further in the very lifeblood of what keeps this creaky infrastructure going - the lines engineers who mend and keep the ancient copper wires connected to our homes.

A strong telecommunications service industry and skills base are crucial to New Zealand's future. They need more investment - more field service technicians, more skills training and apprenticeship programmes - not less.

The workers recognise the Visionstream deal for what it is - a cost-cutting exercise so Reynolds can have an even bigger salary next year.