In a statement to investors this morning, Telstra revealed that it would begin consultation the round of mass-redundancies today – rather than mid-next year, as anticipated.

The company said it now expects to have announced approximately 6000 redundancies by the end of the financial year, with employees to be given their marching orders from July 2020.

A spokesman for the company said affected staff would be consulted this morning.

But he declined to say how many of those are in Adelaide – or even how many employees it has in South Australia – telling InDaily only that Telstra had 31,419 employees across the country as of December 2018.

“Our commitment has always been to brief our people impacted by these proposed changes first,” he said.

“This will happen throughout the day and we’ll provide more detail later this afternoon.”

Telstra CEO Andrew Penn said Telstra had been able to bring costs forward into financial year 2019 because of its investments in digitisation as part of its T22 restructure strategy.

“We understand the significant impact on our people and the uncertainty created by these changes,” said Penn.

“We are doing everything we can to support our people through the change and this includes the up to $50 million we have committed to a transition program that provides a range of services to help people move into a new role.

“We expect to have announced or completed approximately 75 per cent of our direct workforce role reductions by the end of financial year 2019.”

He said there would continue to be job losses as Telstra simplifies and digitises its business.

“We will continue to see role reductions as we replace our legacy systems, digitise and simplify how we work, and respond to thinks like declining NBN and call volumes, but if a final decision is made on the proposal announced today, we expect the majority of our T22 restructure,” he said.

“Overall we are on track in relation to our T22 program.”

InDaily has contacted the Communication Workers Union for comment.

Correction: An earlier version of this article said Telstra began telling 6000 employees this morning that their jobs will be cut. According to a Telstra spokesman, 3200 of those employees had already been told, earlier in this financial year, that they would be made redundant.

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