Telstra outsourcing leads to job cuts across Australia

TELSTRA is cutting more than 300 customer service jobs across Australia as it continues to outsource call centre work to the Philippines.

More Telstra jobs are going to be cut in Melbourne.

TELSTRA is cutting more than 300 customer service jobs as it continues to outsource call centre work to the Philippines.

The telco giant says the bulk of the planned job cuts across its sales, service and national office teams will be made at its Perth and Melbourne centres.

“We have talked to our people about a proposal to make changes to our contact centre and Telstra business teams that will see a total of 326 roles impacted nationally,” Telstra said.

“We take our responsibility to support employees through this period very seriously and we absolutely understand the impact announcements like this can have on our staff.

“We constantly review the way we work to simplify our business and remove duplication to improve customer experience.”

The latest cuts come on top of about 400 job losses announced by Telstra in October at its call centres in Hobart, Launceston, Perth, Ballarat and Townsville.

With more than 50 per cent of its customers’ interactions now online, there is less need for call centre workers, Telstra said. The Community and Public Sector Union said the latest cuts were expected to affect about 94 jobs in Perth and 140 in Melbourne. “CPSU members working at Telstra predict that network outages and other problems will only become more common because of the highly skilled people who have been sacked,” Union official Teresa Davison said.

Telstra said the job cuts will not affect its network.