Contractor Transfield Services is proposing to make 154 staff redundant, saying it needed to adapt its telecommunications business to stay ahead of significant changes.
The move was revealed by the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union (EPMU) which said 125 of the redundancies involved field managers, designers and field staff throughout much of the country.
The EPMU said Transfield was a major contractor for Telecom and the redundancies showed Telecom's failure to properly fund the network.
In June Telecom's network access business Chorus announced it was awarding a 10-year contract worth about $1 billion to Transfield to carry out field force operations in several parts of the country.
But it also announced it was bringing in Australian company Visionstream in some areas, making it the third company doing the work, along with Transfield and Downer EDi Engineering.
The three 10-year contracts were worth a total of about $3 billion.
Today the EPMU said it would be fighting the Transfield redundancies, but also said the entire industry was being starved of cash as Telecom moved to squeeze profit from its operations.
That could be seen in the attempts by Visionstream to force workers into "dire" contracting arrangements, the EPMU said.
"The union is calling for the Government to step in now before it is too late for the skilled workforce and for New Zealand's vital telecommunications infrastructure."
EPMU national secretary Andrew Little said Telecom had an ongoing tactic of playing contractors off against each other to drive prices down.
"It's a model that's hurting our members and endangering the long term security of New Zealand's broadband," he said.
Source: NZ Herald
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