SO the unions seem to have won a small battle in their war against Telkom.
However, stopping Telkom from outsourcing many of its core operations may, in the long run, be a pyrrhic victory hampering Telkom's ability to compete in the more competitive SA market.
Many people, myself included, love to see the little guy taking on the big, mean Telkom and coming out on top but I am afraid that by fighting Telkom's plans, the unions are going to end up hurting the very people they represent in the long run.
The fact of the matter is that telecommunications is a specialist business. You cannot simply pick up any guy off the street corner, hand him a network switch and hope he has some clue about what to do with it.
Sadly, running a telecoms network requires years of training and experience, both of which are in short supply globally.
In fact, you could probably walk into almost any major telecoms operator across the globe and it would hardly be surprising to find a few South African expats tinkering with the equipment.
Focus on the difference
The big trend in telecoms is outsourcing. At a recent press briefing, Neotel CEO Ajay Pandey said that the company had just passed the 1 000 employee mark, with multiples of that number working for the company indirectly.
This is because the company has outsourced the parts of the business that it does not need to run internally and focused on the bit that make a difference.
This is where the unions seem to be losing the plot.
Telkom will not be a successful telecommunications operator because it is able to run a cable to your house.
It will not be successful because of those guys in the white vans that fix your line when it breaks.
It will not be successful because it is able to keep a national network connection millions of people up and running from day to day.
It will be successful because it is able to do those mundane things at the lowest possible cost while focusing on bringing all the little parts together to make a better whole and package them in a way that the customer finds attractive.
The most efficient way to get the mundane tasks out of the way is to outsource them to companies that spend every hour of every day trying to figure out how to do it better.
Telkom has bigger problems than worrying about how to optimally shunt data round its network.
Protection
You could argue that the unions are looking after their own people here and the needs of Telkom come second to that. While this is a valid concern, it is not what is driving the outrage on the part of the unions.
Right now, the union have Telkom exactly where they want it. The workforce is broadly unionised and because of this the unions have power over Telkom.
Start outsourcing and the power is distributed. Instead of being able to take action against one company they have to now fight with five. Their unified front is broken and their power over Telkom is virtually nil.
This smacks of a situation where the union leadership are trying to preserve their position of power fighting change because they don't like change, not because it is necessarily bad for their members.
The simple issue is this: if Telkom does not become more competitive it is going to get eaten alive by Neotel, Vodacom and MTN as well as by the next wave of telecoms operators that we have yet to see.
And as much as we all like to see Telkom being given a hard time, it really isn't in the interest of workers for the source of their income to fall on hard times.
- Fin24.com