Solidarity is concerned about Telkom job losses caused by LLU

Solidarity is concerned about Telkom job losses caused by LLU

Trade union Solidarity said that they are concerned about job losses at Telkom because of LLU, but Internet Solutions says that argument does not hold

Yeah Telkom, **** YOU!!!

But would IS hire those same Telkom employee's?

Who cares, what about the jobs that LLU would assist in creating? Is job creation not the real goal? Unless Telkom is willing to employ a few thousand more people, this argument doesn't hold.

I actually told Telkom years ago that the way forward on the local loop was to provide faster broadband on these links and start to offer meaningful services. This has been done in other countries such as Australia (and many more).

It is not good for the country for Telkom's employees to sit on their hands for years and years, doing nothing to improve customer services, and then suddenly squeal when the inevitable happens.

My ADSL was recently out for nearly a month with big frustration and hardly any assistance and there have to be repercussions for that level of ineptitude and/or complacency (although hats off to the call centre staff for having to concoct explanations for the delays to customers).

On the employment issue - healthy broadband is proven to drive GDP growth and hence create more overall jobs in the economy. All the good staff from Telkom will be snapped up easily in a thriving telco sector - they may, however have to work a little harder.

A very large chunk of change goes towards the salaries of 26000 odd Telkom employees, many of whom are probably the laziest most useless rejects that society has to offer (with a few conscientious people as well that do most of the work).

26000 is far too many people for a company that has less than 5 million fixed lines throughout the whole of South Africa.

One thing Telkom is not, is lean and mean, Telkom is top heavy and bloated.

The unions really do not want LLU to happen in any form as it will erode Telkom's monopoly, and that means Telkom will have to start retrenching staff in an attempt at becoming competitive where fixed lines are concerned.

The unions have failed to consider that even if LLU does not happen, the number of fixed lines continues to decline every year (as has been the case for more than 5 years). That means that Telkom's fixed line revenue has been declining even without LLU, and jobs will be lost as a result of that decline.

Gone are the days when people worked for and retired from a single company for their entire career, union members need to catch a serious wakeup.

LLU will introduce competition and that will come in the form of ISPs offering services that they have never been able to offer before due to Telkom's monopoly, those services will need people to implement and support those services, that translates directly into job creation.

Fixed line competition will result in services being rolled out by many service providers to under serviced areas instead of just the higher income areas and gated communities which Telkom has half-heartedly concentrated on to date.

Solidarity says that it has 5000 members employed by Telkom, and many more members employed elsewhere in the ICT sector. I would like to know if the majority of Solidarity's members, who are also consumers, would prefer increased fixed line competition leading to lower communications expenditure for the average household. Another thing to consider, is that Telkom employees do not pay the same rates that consumers pay for Telkom services like ADSL, Telkom employees are highly subsidised, the rest of the country's consumers are being held to ransom by Telkom.

ICASA needs to consider the needs of the many as opposed to the misguided and selfish needs of the far fewer Telkom employees that really should start looking for jobs elsewhere even if LLU never happens in any shape or form.

Telkom Shareholders said:

You're threatening our quarterly dividends from the next two to three years while these 'new entrants' adopt and stabilize demand of the bit streaming network offerings, and by disrupting existing operations in the company we've invested so heavily in!

If you enforce all these changes too quickly, we're going to have less money flowing to our accounts than we're used to receiving until all of this smooths out!

Click to expand...

I fixed that for you, Telkom.

Maintenance staff will have to continue maintaining the infrastructure.
New service installations will continue to be done by Telkom since it is still their infrastructure.
Basic service levels will still need to be managed by Telkom.

New jobs will need to be created for staff at service providers that wish to employ bit stream services in order to develop, maintain, manage and market any such newly enabled services; the majority of these jobs will, however, not be created within Telkom, but their competitors.

More (new) jobs will need to be created for staff at service providers in order to communicate with Telkom staff for the management of services and infrastructure that these service providers have now been enabled to use.

In the short term, a small amount of extra business-related travel will occur for Telkom marketing/business staff and service provider marketing/business staff and representatives to meet to discuss agreements, tenders and the like, improving service utilization in the accommodation, catering, events organization and transport sectors. Ongoing meetings of a similar nature will need to occur to discuss any proposals for new infrastructure and/or services, as well as the discussion of agreements and tenders to the effect of.

With higher competition and ideally reduction in costs of services, an increase in penetration should follow; this should hold especially true if naked ADSL access becomes a reality, as local players may begin offering QoS managed VoIP services, VoD oriented IPTV services and the like, all of which will require staff in order to develop, manage, maintain, market, etc all of these companies and their staff.


Telkom are only speaking in terms of their own personal interests. Solidarity's speakers are no doubt shareholders in Telkom, and it is because of this that they want to try and play this out to be threatening to jobs as a whole, not only Telkom's employees' jobs.