Press Releases and Announcements - 17 February 2009
CPSU forces Telstra to concede on ballot in Federal Court
Telstra today backed down on its decision to force employees in
Marketing Services to vote on a new non-union enterprise agreement,
after Maurice Blackburn Lawyers sought an injunction to stop the
ballot, on behalf of the CPSU and its members.
Maurice Blackburn Partner, Josh Bornstein who is representing
the CPSU said that:
"At 10am today, Telstra wrote to us advising that it was
pressing ahead with its ballot, which was due to close at 5pm
today.
"The Federal Court hearing started at 2.15. Shortly after the
hearing commenced, Telstra's lawyers advised the Court that the
ballot had been cancelled.
"Late last year, Telstra failed in its attempt to persuade a
large part of its workforce to accept a Non Union Agreement. In
response, Telstra changed tack and began offering small groups of
employees in isolated locations a template non union agreement.
Often the employees were in offices in 3 or 4 states and had no
means of communicating with each other about the offer.
"The case we lodged is a test case under the Workplace
Relations Act, raising the question whether Telstra's strategy
denies the employees a reasonable opportunity to decide whether to
accept the offer of such an agreement.
"Even more fundamentally, the case raises questions about what
is meant by a collective agreement under federal law. The strategy
adopted by Telstra completely deprived the process of any
collective input from the employees.
"We will be monitoring the situation very closely to
ensure that Telstra does not seek to deploy this strategy again,"
Mr. Bornstein said.
For more information please
contact Meaghan
Telford
on 0437 586 093.