by frog
Telecom has won CAFCA’s 2007 Roger Award for NZ’s worst transnational corporation. (TNC). British American Tobacco (BAT) and Spotless were tied as the runners up and the Whanganui DHB was announced the first winner of the Accomplice Award.
To quote the Judges’ Statement:
After looking as though the company would finally come to terms with regulation in the public interest, the year 2007 saw yet another round of delaying tactics, the Xtra debacle that stranded customers in cyberspace, the cabinetisation project which undermines the potential for local loop unbundling to deliver competition, an obscene $5.4 million final year payment to outgoing Chief Executive Officer Theresa Gattung, the scrapping of concessions for non-government organisations and the School Connection scheme. These sins and more ensured Telecom was in top form in this race for the worst transnational in NZ in 2007. Far from taking heart from the appointment of a new soft-sell CEO, the judging panel has heard too many Telecom promises of co-operation to feel anything but dismayed at the confidence the Government is placing in UK import Paul Reynolds.
The judges described Spotless as
a company prepared to destabilise the public health system, to illegally lock out and further impoverish minimum wage workers and their families, to create insecurity and fear among NZ patients, and to coopt a few elected District Health Board members to boot… If there was an award for the stupidest TNC in NZ in 2007 it would have been no contest”. Of joint runner up British American Tobacco: “Smoking is responsible for more preventable deaths than anything else, and BAT is the worst culprit in New Zealand”. In giving the first Accomplice Award to the Whanganui DHB for its role in backing Spotless against its lowpaid hospital workers, they said: “We recognise not only their 2007 services to overseas profiteering on poor health and public money in NZ, but also the leading role they have played in the creation of Public Private Partnerships through the extensive contracting out of core hospital services with a consequent reduction in quality, loyalty and dignity for patients and workers alike.
Charming, these TNCs, no?
Published in Economy, Work, & Welfare by frog on Mon, March 17th, 2008
Tags: British American Tobacco, CAFCA, roger award, Spotless, Telecom, Whanganui DHB, workers
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
That’s the second Roger Award for Telecom, having “won” it in 2004 as well.
They’re now in second place to the all-time leading Rogerer, the now dearly departed TransRail, who “won” it in each of 1997, 2000, and 2002. Their legacy, as Wellington and Auckland rail passengers know all too well, remains with us today and will remain with us for some years yet.
Like or Dislike:
0 
0 (0)
Oh so the fact that Auckland suburban passenger rail only ever used very old rolling stock throughout the period of state ownership, that the NZ Railways twice tried to kill off all Auckland passenger rail services – and the first major improvement was under private ownership in a deal with Transit NZ, as funder (when Auckland got its first proper suburban passenger rolling stock instead of 50 year old plus old carriages), doesn’t really enter into examination of the facts. Similarly, Wellington passenger rail services were on their knees in the late 1970s when the early 1900-1910 era wooden carriages being towed around were falling apart, and there was not enough stock. The Muldoon government finally coughed up for the current generation of Hungarian carriages in the early 1980s.
State ownership of the railways in NZ was a legacy of running down a very inefficient operation for decades on end.
Like or Dislike:
0 
0 (0)
Orocon have just installed ADSL 2 in a Telecom exchange. The problem with Telecom was that it acted too much like a state monopoly.
Glad to see free market competition being stimulated in this area….
Like or Dislike:
0 
0 (0)
BluePeter said:Glad to see free market competition being stimulated in this area…
So am I, BluePeter. Unlike rail (a natural monopoly), telecommunications is an area where free market competition can work, and often does work to the consumer’s benefit overseas.
The problem with Telecom was that it was effectively a monopoly – not whether it acted like a “state” one. [See, I'm not a communist after all!]
libertyscott: I wasn’t defending NZ Rail’s dereliction of passenger rail services at all. You’re right to be as critical of that era as of the TransRail era. But that doesn’t excuse TransRail for what happened (and failed to happen) when they were running them.
To quote from the Judges’ Statement from the 2002 Roger Award:
Since privatisation, the company has cut staff, services, safety, and many corners. Recently, the culture of corporate greed has included extended depreciation, asset stripping and inflated income through creative accounting, with track renewals treated as capital expenditure and the costs added to fixed assets rather than treated as a deduction from revenue, practices which fooled the sharemarket into thnking that Tranz Rail was in good heart and its shares worth buying. Profits were also artificially inflated by the sell-off (and lease-back) of the Aratere ferry for $55 million and of rolling stock for $93 million. This generated a profit of $90 million. The hidden cost is the lease commitment of $542 million on these two deals over the life of the leases.
These sharp practices initiated a recovery in the share price to $3.50 and $3.70 a share, whereupon Faye Richwhite and Wisconsin Central sold out in February 2002. in September these shares were worth only $1.70, an indication of what the robber barons had done to TR. The other downstream effect of the failure to deliver service to customers is the proliferation of juggernaught truck and trailer rigs transporting logs and containers etc. on our roads that should be transported by rail.
The record in 2002 is no improvement on past behaviour, with disregard of the health and safety of passengers and the few workers who have not been downsized out of the company an ongoing scandal. Another 350 jobs were cut in this year, with the contracting out of track maintenance together with the welding mistakes of the past resulting in the heat related chaos on the Wellington commuter system early in 2003. Heat buckled lines and derailments the previous summer caused the Land Transport Safety Authority to commission the Halliburton KBR report which found that passenger lives had been endangered by these decisions. LTSA ordered Tranz Rail to rehire 92 sacked staff and slow passenger trains to 40 kmh.
The sell off of infrastructure and retreat from passenger services to ferry and freight only continued with the sale of the Auckland rail corridor to government, with the lease and infrastructure priced probably too high at $81 million. Wellington is next. And there have been two more deaths of employees and a number of near misses. The saga never ends. Tranz Rail deserves huge censure with successive governments’ handling of rail little better. The Roger Award 2002 is the least Tranz Rail can expect.
Like or Dislike:
0 
0 (0)
>>The problem with Telecom was that it was effectively a monopoly
Yah, we agree.
The free market can produce them too, sometimes. Consumer choice and price competition should be the goal.
Like or Dislike:
0 
0 (0)
The problem with Telecom was and still is that the actual lines are a natural monopoly, just like the railways. Unbundling the loop to allow competition is the only way to get any real market going. The resulting ‘lines company’ should either be state owned or heavily regulated to prevent it from ripping off the citizenry. Normative economics, that’s all I want. The Chicago school’s free-market ideology has destroyed much of what was actually working in the west. Just as we are beginning to see the light, the Rogernome rises from the ashes. Do visit No Right Turn and see what idiot/savant has to say about that. Very amusing.
Like or Dislike:
0 
0 (0)
I think it should have been unbundled years ago, probably when Telecom was sold.
Curious thing is that Telstra aren’t offering high speed either, and they have their own network in Wellington.
Like or Dislike:
0 
0 (0)
Won’t get Rogered again! Speaking of the rise of the Rogergnome from the ashes, frog, I recall Pete Townshend writing back in 1970:
There’s nothing in the street
Looks any different to me
And the slogans are replaced, by-the-bye
And the parting on the left
Is now the parting on the right
And the beards have all grown longer overnight
I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around me
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I’ll get on my knees and pray
We don’t get fooled again
Don’t get fooled again
No, no!
Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss
Like or Dislike:
0 
0 (0)
Roger had the right idea. Shame it wasn’t carried through.
Muldoon, that great socialist windbag, had brought the country to its knees, along with Unions…..
Like or Dislike:
0 
0 (0)
BTW:
Pete Townsend: “The song was meant to let **politicians and revolutionaries** alike know that what lay in the centre of my life was not for sale, and could not be co-opted into any obvious cause… I am just a song-writer…. Won’t Get Fooled Again – then – was a song that pleaded ‘….leave me alone with my family to live my life, so I can work for change in my own way….’”
An oath that swears off naïve idealism once and for all. Libertarian….
Like or Dislike:
0 
0 (0)
BluePeter, I agree with Pete Townshend here, but i suspect not with you. I think you may be equating Chicago school’s free-market ideology with libertarianism. They are not the same.
In many respects, Keith Locke is more of a libertarian than Roger Douglas. Roger didn’t stand up for human rights in the same way Keith has. Roger’s so-called “libertarianism” ideology was libertarian only for the wealthy – ask the thousands who were thrown out of their jobs and onto the dole by it. Oh, and I suspect he would have liked to have solved that problem by abolishing the dole if he’d been given the chance.
Like or Dislike:
0 
0 (0)
To talk of whether Keith Locke or Roger Douglas is the more libertarian is laughable. Keith Locke believes in big nanny state government and Roger Douglas believes in the welfare state funded through GST, and compulsory superannuation and health care. Libertarians believe in none of the above.
Railways are not a natural monopoly, what do you call roads? Telecom’s natural monopoly status is highly questionable as well. Telstra Clear happily duplicated the network in Kapiti, Wellington and Christchurch, and was seeking to do so in Auckland, Dunedin, Hamilton and Tauranga except the government opening up of Telecom’s property made it easier to sit back and do nothing. Vodafone and Telecom have over time built four duplicate cellular phone networks (two have been decommissioned) over 20 years covering most of the population. Competition resulted in vast reductions in national, international call prices, dial up internet services and value added telecoms services well before local loop unbundling. There has been very much a real market in telecommunications since the mid 1990s when multiple entrants emerged.
Of course when it was the state owned Post Office nobody knows how many jobs were lost because it couldn’t supply phone lines within several weeks, and vastly overpriced national and international calls to cross subsidise residential local calling. However, for all the moaning about Telecom’s profits, the truth is they are small fry compared to the productivity improvements and opportunities realised by the reform of the sector.
Like or Dislike:
0 
0 (0)
toad, As scandalous as F/W’s abuses of Tranzrail were they pale almost into insignificance compared with the behaviour of the shareholders of our highways. In 2000 the National Road Safety Committee informed the shareholding ministers of Transit and Transfund that investing just half of the Crown’s roading profits into road safety engineering would save 200 lives a year by 2010 and prevent over 1,000 cripppling injuries. Despite the Crown making multi-billion dollar profits every year since then they have resisted calls from the NRSC, the LTSA, Transit and Treasury to behave ethically. Rather than mend their ways the shareholding ministers have blamed the NRSC and the public for the road toll getting stuck at 400 death each year.
To paraphrase the LTSA – The faster the bucks the bigger the mess.
Like or Dislike:
0 
0 (0)
LS, get your facts right. Telstra Clear have not “duplicated the network” in Christchurch. Some suburbs may have T/C cables, typically big monstrosities hung overhead.
The rest are at the mercy of Telecon.
Like or Dislike:
0 
0 (0)
libertyscott: You’ve prompted me to tell my own personal story of why I think Telecom deserves the Roger Award.
My landline phone service had been with Telecom for many years until last year, but my internet and mobile with Vodafone-ihug. When I was about to move house I decided that I may as well consolidate them all with Vodafone-ihug, so contracted with them for a landline phone service as well as an internet service at my new house when I moved, and cancelled my contract with Telecom.
All looked to be going well, there was a phone line active the day I moved in. But when I plugged in my computer, there was no adsl signal.
So I phoned ihug, who told me that there was a delay with the Telecom technician connecting the adsl, and that this should occur within 2 days. It didn’t, so I phoned back – the start of a full month of phone calls and emails to Vodafone-ihug to try to sort the problem. Several times I was told that Telecom technicians had checked the adsl connection, and had concluded that the problem must be mine or Vodafone-ihug’s.
It eventually transpired, after a month of only slow dial-up internet, that what Telecom had done each time was not to check the connection itself, but to check the paperwork. And because the paperwork said there was an adsl connection, there had to be one, even though in reality there was not and someone had wrongly signed off that there was.
Vodafone-ihug agreed to give me a month’s free internet for my inconvenience, even though it was not their fault. Telecom had repeatedly lied to them that I had an adsl connection and that they had checked it was functional when I did not and they had not.
Like or Dislike:
0 
0 (0)
I had the exact same problem in the UK with BT, and this was after BT was broken up. My complaint was not uncommon.
Multiple providers on the local loop is not a straightforward proposition, it would seem.
Like or Dislike:
0 
0 (0)