Some strike action cancelled: NCR
Up to 90 of NCR's field service engineers walked off the job on Monday in New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia, seeking better pay levels. NSW staff had planned to return to work next Monday, with those from South Australia and Queensland returning today and Thursday, respectively.
But NCR today said it had been informed by the Australian Services Union (ASU), which is coordinating the action, that "it had cancelled planned industrial action by customer engineers for the rest of this week in New South Wales and Queensland".
"Staff that participated in the industrial action returned to work today," NCR said.
While the ASU had claimed up to 90 of a total of 150 workers had participated in the action, NCR said only 50 employees were involved.
The ASU's NSW and ACT Services branch secretary, Sally McManus, told ZDNet Australia the industrial action had been called off "as a sign of good faith" after NCR agreed to tomorrow's negotiations.
However, she warned, if the negotiations did not reach a satisfactory conclusion, the ASU would order industrial action in Queensland, South Australia and New South Wales from Monday next week.
A planned four-day strike in Victoria starting this weekend, expected to involve up to 40 engineers, would not be cancelled unless there was a satisfactory outcome tomorrow, McManus said.
Although the ASU initially claimed the strike could cause chaos to IT systems at airports, banks and educational institutions around the nation, customers ZDNet Australia spoke to on Tuesday were unperturbed.
"We don't believe it will have any impact on our ATM network," a spokesperson for the Commonwealth Bank said. "They [NCR] only do major hardware problems, most of our day to day servicing is done by our staff and other providers."
"It's not really a material issue for us in that I think only 20 of our 15,000-16,000 ATMs are impacted by that industrial action. So I think we're quite confident the impact on our customers will be quite minimal," said a spokesperson from ANZ Bank.