Viva Las Vegas. While their empire burns, the Telstra board enjoys a junket

January 15, 2009

Financial crisis? What financial crisis?

Displaying their now-customary disconnect from reality, Telstra’s top executives and board (hereafter know as the Rat Pack) have just spent more than $100,000 of shareholders’ money on an unnecessary junket to Las Vegas.

The excuse for this extravagant junket was to hold a board meeting in the desert gambling mecca.

Why Sydney or Melbourne were inappropriate, no-one knows. Someone needs to remind Sol Trujillo, Donald McGauchie and the rest of the Rat Pack that the world is in the midst of the worst financial crisis we have seen in our lifetimes.

Everywhere you look, businesses are tightening their belts, cancelling the lavish corporate perks, junkets and other excesses that were greedily consumed during the good times.

Everywhere that is, except in the Telstra boardroom.

Not that Telstra management isn’t calling for restraint from its employees. Work harder for less . . . and by the way, can you sign this document that will lock you into pay rises for the next three years that do not keep pace with the cost of living?

The company has casually sacked or sent overseas thousands of jobs with little regard for those workers’ futures.

But the calls for restraint apparently end at the door of Sol Trujillo, who, lest we forget, enjoyed a 14% pay rise to $13 million last year.

The Vegas trip is a regular pilgrimage for the Telstra board, but in this economic environment goes beyond the pale.

The entire board, senior management team and their partners reportedly stayed at the luxurious Bellagio Hotel, where suites cost up to $1700 a night. Business or first class airfares for the Rat Pack would have cost tens of thousands of dollars.

You might have heard of the Bellagio – it’s the hotel featured in the remake of the movie Ocean’s Eleven.

The Telstra junket reminds us of another film (and novel) set in the neon city: the hallucinatory Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Or how about Indecent Proposal (perhaps that one was about the non-union offers being shopped around the country).

Have a look at some of the media coverage here. Or watch the story from A Current Affair above.

What makes this crass junket even more outrageous is that a pile of problems remain on Sol Trujillo’s desk waiting for him he eventually returns to Australia.

There is the little matter of how to restore confidence in the company’s business model after the botched bid for the National Broadband Network tender.

The shares still haven’t recovered from that disaster.

And, of course, there is the ongoing industrial campaign by the Telstra unions.

Action taken in December was only the first salvo in what will be an ongoing battle for wage justice.

This action has already had a big impact on Telstra services and causing further delays to the transformation program.

Workers are determined to keep up the pressure to force Telstra to the bargaining table to negotiate a fair agreement with the unions.

Written by TelstraUnions · Filed Under News 

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