Staff plan to protest
By ANDREW FANASIA
Staff of Our Telekom are planning to stage a sit-in protest this week following the company’s move to undertake a redundancy exercise.
Sources within Telekom revealed the plan after the nation’s biggest telecommunications firm told its workers around 100 employees will be affected.
“The management does not want anything about its planned redundancy exercise to be publicised in the media,” an insider said.
Telekom informed its workers last week about the planned exercise, saying the move is part of the company’s business re-organisation.
Telekom is owned by the National Provident Fund (NPF).
The Sunday Star was told a meeting on the planned sit-in protest by staff was held Friday.
“In fact the management are trying to hide this from the public and said this is an internal business matter.
“Worst still, they are trying to find a word to replace ‘redundancy’ to suit the staff,” the informant said.
The informant added that Telekom had gone through three business re-organisation already and still they want to do another one.
“There’s no such thing as continuous business re-organisation, it must be known that at the end of such re-organisation the by-product is redundancy,” the source said.
In the memo to staff Telekom management said:
“It understands the anxiety staff are going through regarding the organisational review exercise.
“As a responsible employer, Telekom has engaged our employee assistance program (EAP) service provider, Empower Pacific, to run sessions for our staff so that we can cope with the changes.”
Solomon Star understands that the training were done last week.
The source also revealed that a week ago, the Chief Executive Officer Loyley Ngira and two other board members went to China to meet with telecommunication giant Huawei Company.
This trip occurred while Prime Minister Rick Hou was in Australia to sign the undersea cable deal with Canberra.
Australia is funding the multi-million dollar project after it rejected Huawei from having a hand in it.
A spokesman for the Office of the Prime Minister and Cabinet said they were not informed of Our Telekom’s trip to China.
Meanwhile, the Telekom source said there’s greater need for the overhaul of the company’s management, claiming a lot of issues regarding staff welfare were left unattended.
Telekom management declined to comment on the story when contacted, saying it’s an internal matter.
