Lloyds, RBS ditching more tech workers
And more likely soon
Posted in Management, 21st January 2010 15:26 GMT
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Lloyds has announced over 500 more jobs cuts, hard on the heels of Royal Bank of Scotland's announcement it is laying off 221 techies at its Dublin Technology Centre.
The Dublin centre is to shut later this year with the loss of 196 jobs and 25 posts in Belfast will also go. Some people will be transferred to other RBS offices.
The bank said it would offer staff redeployment where possible and try and keep compulsory redundancies to a minimum, ComputerWorld reported. The cuts will start in July.
Meanwhile Lloyds is laying of 585 people as a result of the closure of its personal loan centres. This could be more controversial because the bank is controlled by the British government.
It is also expected that Lloyds will lay off hundreds more staff as its merger with Halifax Bank of Scotland goes ahead. Lloyds has historically been a big fan of outsourcing, with hundreds of back office staff based in India.
Bank of Scotland IT staff are expecting wide ranging job cuts, although we're also hearing from staff who have left already rather than wait for redundancy.
Big job cuts could come back to haunt the government.
Of course HBOS was not a total stranger to outsourcing - Computacenter dealt with all its desktop estate, and the reseller is also advising on integration problems still being dealt with as a result of the Halifax, Bank of Scotland merger. ®
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COMMENTS
leaving the sinking ship
I've just moved my current account from a big bad corporate cannibal bank that eats its own kind to one of the few friendly local and mutual building societies left. I'm fed up of being taxed in order to pay bonuses to these bastards.
IT boycott
If all the people who work in IT boycotted these companies who offshore jobs and generaly shafting IT workers when its all the ruddy accountants fault then they would have to listern.
Work in IT - look at changing banks if its one of those two. fuck em. I did.
anon because a good idea isn't tied to a name.
Redundancy terms
Have you seen them?
"Bank of Scotland IT staff are expecting wide ranging job cuts, although we're also hearing from staff who have left already rather than wait for redundancy."
So they chose to leave with nothing. Instead of waiting for the possibility they'd have to leave anyway but with a nice big cash package? Fair enough...
A/C - I may work for one of the companies mentioned
Gone to another continent.
As an Ex RBS IT employee (and thankful for it) I can assure you that the terms will be good for redundency, the dublin office has been open since 1997, the terms for the Ulster Employees was something ridiculous like 6x there monthly salary for each year worked plus extra if they had children.
I expect that all of the jobs are actually going off to India, not that senior management would admit that, projects are simply closed in the UK and Ireland and no new projects are started in the UK/Ireland. That way they never have to admit they are offshoring.
There are still plenty of IT workers coming over from India on visas while UK workers are allowed to rot on the dole queue. The London office has a considerable number of them. Not much you can do when the government allows it. Much like most of the manufacturing industry going offshore it seems that anything and everything that can go will go, all the while the government sits back and watches without wanting to intervene.
Unions are good but in the face of cuts can do very little, especially as the union/management relationship is more or less dead at RBS.
Lloyds' stone age tech
Shame Lloyds will probably keep the analysts who designed their lumbering, obtuse customer dbs, and the muppets who like to keep the servers permanently a decade out of date..
After a few visits/ phone calls where 'the system' is down; *across the organisation; *for hours at a time - I found I'd fallen of the db cos I'd got a card sent through to the branch (not the only schoolboy bug, or the first instance).
Now the govt owns Lloyds, maybe they could save a few bob and develop the NIR 'in-house' at Lloyds - that'd be fun to watch!
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