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Pandemic Pay Cuts Didn’t Sit Well with One Deloitte Employee In Australia

Posted on by Jason Bramwell

Yesterday Adrienne wrote an excellent post about winners and losers in accounting during the coronavirus pandemic. I’ve got one to add to the losers side: Deloitte Australia employees.

Why? Not only have most Australian Green Dotters taken a 20% cut in pay since May (which CEO Richard Deutsch said was “the least worst option” to preserve as many jobs as possible at the firm), but they also ended up having to witness the firm bringing the hammer down on 700 of their colleagues in June.

One anonymous Deloitter who talked to The Sydney Morning Herald recently expressed his or her displeasure with how the firm handled its pandemic austerity measures (bold emphasis added):

One of the Deloitte employees said pay packets should have been immediately reinstated once the company cut jobs. “After all the pay cuts were to avoid job losses.”

“After the redundancies the headcount matched production of the firm and therefore everyone is busy with work – no reason therefore to continue pay cuts. The only reason to continue pay cuts it to protect partner profit.”

Staff signed up to the in-house superannuation scheme also had life insurance payouts reduced by 20 per cent and many claim they were not told about these changes before they were implemented.

The employee said morale at the company had been destroyed as trust in the company’s strategy has been eroded. “This has hit employees hard. The integrity of the firm is gone.”

The 20 per cent pay cuts applied only to workers earning more than $65,000, are set to be reversed on October 1. Partner pay was cut by 25 per cent.

This person isn’t the first Deloitte Australia employee to flame management over the pay cuts. An analyst in audit and assurance got his 15 minutes of fame around the usual chatter sites in April by sending the following letter to Deloitte bigwigs.

Enjoy!

To the Deloitte Executive (1) by Jason Bramwell

‘The integrity of the firm is gone’: Deloitte, KPMG staff angry at pay cuts [The Sydney Morning Herald]

Related articles:

Winners and Losers in Accounting: Coronavirus Edition
Layoff Watch ’20: Deloitte’s Purging Continues, This Time In Australia

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Thumbnail image for cry baby.jpgIn Deloitte’s Survey Du Jour we learn that your future underlings are going to want — nay — DEMAND the ability to move up in Farmville while they’re at work (at least one person understands your obsession).
Okay, demand is a stretch but dammit the kids these days are an ethically conscious bunch so you can trust them to get their work done while checking all their hot friend of friends.

Nearly nine-in-10 (88 percent) teens surveyed use social networks every day, with 70 percent saying they participate in social networking an hour or more daily. More than half (58 percent) said they would consider their ability to access social networks at work when considering a job offer from a potential employer. This comes as many organizations have begun implementing policies that limit access to social networks during the workday due to concerns about unethical usages, such as time theft, spreading rumors about co-workers or managers and leaking proprietary information, among other reasons.
Most of the teens surveyed feel prepared to make ethical decisions at work (82 percent) and a significant majority of teens say they do not behave unethically while using social networks (83 percent).

There’s really no cause for concern when you’ve got newbies out there asking their friends to vote for their sluttiest co-worker using a work email address. We do realize that some people make better decisions than others.
Overall, we don’t see what the BFD is. Commercials on the tube portray “responsible” adults on Facebook so to allude that the next wave of corporate soldiers would be the only ones that wouldn’t take a job with limited access to social networks seems weak. There’s plenty of people working already that have that point of view. Plus, pretty soon everyone on FB, Twitter, et al. will have phones that can run those apps. Just let people do what they want and they’ll be much happier.
Now excuse us, we’ve got strawberries to harvest.
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Sharon Allen has spent 38 years at Deloitte. Doing the math on that, it probably feels more like a millennia. Accordingly, Ms. Allen has decided to hang up her green dot and chillax in Pasadena (Q&A with Accounting Today and we’ve picked out some of the highlights, including yes, a par-tay.


For starters, Sharon is a closer!

It’s a good time to leave when you’re on a high. I feel very confident in future leadership and the direction of our organization, and I think it’s just absolutely the right time to turn the reins over to others and proudly watch them continue to lead the firm in a good direction.

There will be a retirement rager, natch.

I’m going to have a big party. Yes.

Retirement will involve quality time with the hubby (but not so much that he goes nuts) and leading the Village People.

First of all I plan to spend a lot more time with my husband, family and friends, but of course there will probably be a limit on how much togetherness he can stand.[…] I have already committed to becoming the chairman of the board of the national YMCA board, which is an organization I’ve been involved with for over 25 years. I’m sure I will find ways to keep productively busy.

In case you weren’t aware, she doesn’t have a Y chromosome.

I am proud of many firsts that are in front of the titles I have carried. I was fortunate to be the first woman to become an office managing partner, the first woman to become a regional managing partner, the first woman to be elected to the board at Deloitte, and that’s been some years ago now. But I have to say my proudest accomplishment, I believe, was to have been elected as the first independent chairman of Deloitte’s board of directors. We separated our chairman and CEO role and created a full-time independent executive chairman of the board. It is an elected position by our partners, and I was very proud to be elected to that role. I always say, “Oh, by the way, I’m a woman.” It’s a very important distinction for me.

She’s more like you than you think – she got passed up for a manager promotion because her supervisor was clueless!

[P]erhaps one of the most important challenges that I had as I was coming up through my career also turned out to be one of my best lessons. That was when I was about four years into the firm and I expected an early promotion to manager, and I was passed over for that promotion. Interestingly, as I walked into my supervisor’s office and clicked off all the reasons why I thought I should have had the promotion and had earned it, he kind of sat back in his chair and looked at me and said, “I didn’t even know you did all those things.”

What about this boys club mentality?

I do think that there still is an underrepresentation of women in senior leadership in business generally and certainly in the board room of corporate organizations today. I do believe that organizations need to examine how they are recruiting, how they assure women are proportionally given the best assignments.

You know, back in the day, we basically had to come to work in drag.

There is a very big difference between today’s women and women of my era when I started in the profession because, in those days, honestly, you almost had to pretend there were no differences. I came up in the business world of wearing a suit and a little bow tie and trying to dress like the men and, of course, fortunately, men and women both can acknowledge the difference and benefit from that.

Leave Sharon your well wishes (or food and entertainment requests) below and if you get invited to this party, email us the pictures.

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