Maurice Blackburn

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.