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Australian Job Losses

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In the broadest possible context, growth is a natural result of evolution. Evolution suffers though from a lot of growth into dead ends.

In that, evolution and business seem to have a lot in common, but there's nothing wrong with growth as a fundamental principal.
 
Origin lays off 850 staff to counter profit fall
Updated 13 minutes ago

MAP: Australia
Origin Energy has confirmed that it will axe a total of 850 jobs by the end of the year.

Around 500 of those positions have already gone, as the company sharpens its focus on containing costs.

The announcement came as the energy retailer and gas producer posted a half-year profit slump of 34 per cent, to $524 million.

Origin expects its full-year profit to fall by 10 to 15 per cent.

The company will pay its shareholders an interim, fully franked dividend of 25 cents per share.

Origin Energy shares slumped 8.6 per cent on the result to $11.32 by 12:44pm (AEDT).
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http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-02-21/origin-says-850-staff-going-to-counter-profit-fall/4532188

And so it goes......more jobs eh, Juliar?
 
boofis said:
Lies!

&

Dr smith growth isn't a result of evolution, evolution is just a term to describe processes/events that involve growth and decline. As you so rightly almost pointed out, nothing can continually grow forever.
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I dont know about that the Yanks seem to think they can have an endless debt growth rate.
 
Trembling Hand said:
See what the responsibilities are of a director. Its pretty simple. Act in the best interests of the COMPANY. That many times includes reducing your expensive and workforce when your business or part there of is reducing.
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Understand what you are saying, but reducing the workforce and maximising short term profit is not always in the best interests of the company overall.

1. Supplier of parts we use at work. It's a multi-national company which historically (and still does) manufacture some items in Australia.

In short, they outsourced production of some components to someone in China. Suffice to say that there were quality control problems, which turned up as reliability problems with the equipment we purchase. Failure rates were unacceptable and cost $.

End result is that we have discontinued a 32 year exclusive relationship with this supplier and gone directly to a competitor. I also know as fact that at least 70% (possibly higher) of their Australian customers are now obtaining some or all of their purchases from one of the two main rival companies. It's possible that the other 30% might be as well - it's just that I haven't contacted them to ask so not sure about what they're doing.

Whatever they saved by manufacturing in China, they have lost 100+ times over through loss of ongoing business. The odds are we'll never go back to them. Consumers might be willing to muck about with dodgy parts, but professional users sure aren't interested in anything that's not up to scratch.

For the record, the new supplier manufactures in Victoria.

2. Origin Energy were mentioned earlier in this thread as getting rid of a lot of staff.

I expect that rival electricity retailers will have smile on their face at this news. Origin already has a poor reputation for customer service. :2twocents
 
Smurf1976 said:
Understand what you are saying, but reducing the workforce and maximising short term profit is not always in the best interests of the company overall.
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We are talking about Sensis here. When was the last time anyone used a printed phone book? I haven't even used the on-line version in years. Google is far better.

The only person I know of who has used the yellow pages was my ex's dad. He used to have it in the car and I asked him one day what do you need that for? He said,

You never know when you will be caught short in a public place without dunny paper
:flush:
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Better to sack 1/4 of your workforce than jeopardise all of them plus your suppliers and shareholders.
 
boofis said:
So the employees don't comprise any part of the COMPANY? Really?
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Staff are an expense, shareholders and owners are capital.

From a management perspective, treating staff as an asset and investing in their skills and training might be a prudent way to get the most productivity out of them, but from a financial perspective they are and will always be an expense.

Employees are paid for their time to complete tasks that generate or enable the generation of revenue for the company's shareholders. All the fuzzy feelings and investment in the future, staff rewards blah blah blah, are all a means of extracting greater productivity to improve the profit and loss statement and make the business ratios look better.

That's the core of it. It's not nice, but it's not personal.
 
Vixs said:
Staff are an expense, shareholders and owners are capital.

From a management perspective, treating staff as an asset and investing in their skills and training might be a prudent way to get the most productivity out of them, but from a financial perspective they are and will always be an expense.

Employees are paid for their time to complete tasks that generate or enable the generation of revenue for the company's shareholders. All the fuzzy feelings and investment in the future, staff rewards blah blah blah, are all a means of extracting greater productivity to improve the profit and loss statement and make the business ratios look better.

That's the core of it. It's not nice, but it's not personal.
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HEY THERE!!

Don't post this realistic understanding of employees.

If any of my employees read this they will start stealing more stuff than they already do to justify their self importance ;)

MW
Signed in many years ago
 
Trembling Hand said:
Better to sack 1/4 of your workforce than jeopardise all of them plus your suppliers and shareholders.
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My point is whether or not sacking the workers is a means to an actual turnaround? Or is it just a slow spiral to the bottom?

What they really need to do is grow revenue and if cutting staff hampers that then, in the long term, it's not going to work. They need to reinvent themselves not simply cut costs and keep doing what they've always done. :2twocents
 
Vixs said:
Staff are an expense, shareholders and owners are capital
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Depending on circumstances, the intellectual property that sits with the staff can be the main value of the company. Obviously that's not always the case, but there are situations where it is.

If it's all in the heads of a dozen key staff then you're pretty much stuffed if they all walk out the door.

Reminds me of a situation where literally all the employees (of which there were only half a dozen) were in a lottery syndicate with the potential prize being enough that most (all?) would probably have left their jobs if they had won. Management practically **** themselves when they found out that a lotto draw on Saturday night was in fact a credible threat to the business which they could do nothing about. :2twocents
 
Smurf you are talking about examples that are on the margins. Bottom line its not management that has sacked these staff its you, me and boofis as voting consumers that has caused the staff to be sacked. Its a service that we simple do not purchase any more. And never will again no matter what smart and bright things the company does. We simply do not open our wallets and hand over the hard earned to Sensis and a lot of these company anymore and with that we are directly saying 'service providers you and your staff are sacked'.

Thats the way its always been. It a necessity to innovation and the great comfortable live we all live as a community, in spite of individuals struggle from time to time. We vote winners with our wallets. In this case we have very clearly voted for google over the yellow pages.

You cannot whinge about companies and their employees being voted off the island when its us who demand the change.
 
Trembling Hand said:
You cannot whinge about companies and their employees being voted off the island when its us who demand the change.
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Talk to just about anyone and you'll find that there's a fair degree of dislike for foreign call centres, to the point that some companies (Commonwealth Bank being among them) use the simple existence of Australian call centres as part of their marketing strategy.

I don't deny for a moment that Sensis' print based business model is effectively dead. But sending the call centres off shore takes it from "don't need anymore" to "actively avoid" in the minds of many. It's almost beyond belief that anyone would choose to call one of those Indian call centres unless they really had to.

For the record, my original post was nothing to do with Sensis. I mentioned Origin Energy but was primarily referring to your post about the responsibilities of a director being toward the company rather than employees. I agree with that point, but in many cases "cost cutting" is not in the best interests of the company if the resultant brand damage exceeds the money saved through the cost cutting. :2twocents
 
TH you are right, it's clear that the physical yellow and white pages are outdated but I still use the online ones all the time; my last search was bricklayers in melbourne only last week.

Telstra 698 cuts and 391 roles heading to the Phillipines or Indonesia. That's not about consumers voting with their wallets, that's management wanting to vote with their own wallets, no? Why not start a call centre here? Australian workers cost too much? Too much red tape?

The extremely frustrating thing for me is the acceptance of this pattern across all sectors; get our food from everywhere else around the world, get our services from everywhere else around the world, get our infrastructure from everywhere else around the world, etc.

And I do agree, alot, but not all, of it boils down to people voting with their wallets, and this is where the ordinary person needs to realise we need to start being willing to pay more (e.g. the actual value) for everything according to how much a developed country citizen expects to be paid or just learn to accept being paid less.

Slave like wages paid to off shore workers may get us a cheap product/service/whatever in the here and now, but it will bend us over in the long run as in the case of the aforementioned.
 
boofis said:
The extremely frustrating thing for me is the acceptance of this pattern across all sectors; get our food from everywhere else around the world, get our services from everywhere else around the world, get our infrastructure from everywhere else around the world, etc.

And I do agree, alot, but not all, of it boils down to people voting with their wallets, and this is where the ordinary person needs to realise we need to start being willing to pay more (e.g. the actual value) for everything according to how much a developed country citizen expects to be paid or just learn to accept being paid less.

Slave like wages paid to off shore workers may get us a cheap product/service/whatever in the here and now, but it will bend us over in the long run as in the case of the aforementioned.
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I went to our nearest Masters Home Imp conglomerate last weekend - between them and Bunnings it is now possible to buy your entire kitchen, including cabinetry, appliances, sinks, ovens, fridges, window treatments - you name it. Now I know these businesses are simply doing what big business does, but between them they're putting so much pressure on small businesses by simply taking away their market. It's next to impossible for small business to compete with their buying power. I have visions of us becoming a land where Woolies and Wesfarmers will one day dominate totally. (yes, I own shares in both):eek:

I'll acknowledge that my sympathies naturally lie with small businesses, but it struck me as wrong that two such large organisations have the power to put so many ordinary people out of work simply by their neverending expansion into new product lines of cheap imported products bought at a discount due to their huge volumes. In my business I've seen many cabinet makers have to shut their doors over the past few years - the employees they've had to make redundant often receive sympathy, but their employers are often regarded as money-grubbing "bosses" out to screw every last ounce of blood out of their employees and then casting them off without a care. Most of the time nothing is further from the truth - but the same people who accuse small business of not paying high enough wages, or providing grand enough working conditions, are often totally shocked that their jobs rely on their employers making enough profit to be viable, and to continue to cover their wages! Meanwhile, we all spend our hard-earned $$$s online, or at the dreaded conglomerates, rather than at the Mum & Dad businesses that struggle to compete due to their high overheads. I can't really see an answer and the white light at the end of the tunnel is most likely the train of progress come to finish small business off for good:cry:

Btw - I was at Masters to see if their garden section was any better than the local Bunnings, as they drove my local garden centre out of business years ago.......
 
boofis said:
Telstra 698 cuts and 391 roles heading to the Phillipines or Indonesia. That's not about consumers voting with their wallets, that's management wanting to vote with their own wallets, no? Why not start a call centre here? Australian workers cost too much? Too much red tape?
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As an ex-Telstra staffer I can say that you are referring to the tip of the iceberg with respect to outsourcing there. An inside joke was that Telstra was primarily an external contract management company. Where they don't outsource directly they use proxies like IBM where much of their IT support is now contracted to. IBM then transfers this work to India (outsourcing by stealth). Thousands of well paid IT jobs have been axed this way.

The extremely frustrating thing for me is the acceptance of this pattern across all sectors; get our food from everywhere else around the world, get our services from everywhere else around the world, get our infrastructure from everywhere else around the world, etc..
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Such is the wonderful world of the "services" based economy. We are going down the same path as the US and this is one reason why the (real) unemployment rate in the US remains so high. History shows that the vast majority of offshored jobs will never come back. As long as the AUD remains an overvalued currency expect the exodus of jobs offshore to continue to gain pace.

This is also a failure of political policy and foresight in many western societies. The evil of "protectionism" is rolled out when preservation of local sourcing is raised but this is the norm for many Asia economies that have erected all kinds of protectionist barriers against goods across the spectrum of finished to raw materials to agriculture.
 
IBM continues to slash its IT workforce in Aus in favor of offshoring...

http://www.theage.com.au/it-pro/business-it/ibm-quietly-slashing-australian-jobs-20130619-2oic6.html

The exodus of IT jobs from the clever country continues. When 1,000 auto workers lose their jobs at Ford in 3 years they are promised millions in government assistance and generous redundancy packages but when 1,500 IT positions are axed there's hardly a whimper. The local IT industry is a major exploiter of the 457 visa system as well yet there is no problem with the 457 visa program?

Where is the outrage and shock when the largest corporate IT employers (banks, Telstra, BHP etc.) in Aus use surrogates like IBM to offshore thousands of IT sector jobs?

Is it any wonder enrollment in IT programs at Uni are in steep decline? Does either party care if there is an IT industry in Aus and if so what is the policy platform to support it?
 

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