Barclays axes 422 UK IT staff
Job massacre will help wealthy bank 'innovate'
Posted in Management, 13th January 2012 14:58 GMT
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Barclays is cutting back its UK IT workforce by axing 422 jobs - mainly at Radbroke Hall in Knutsford, northwest England.
The bank euphemistically said that the lay-offs are part of "essential changes to technology and infrastructure". A well-placed source told The Reg that affected staff should expect more details on Monday.
Barclays stressed that the cuts would not affect their IT services, but would let the bank (net income for 2011: £6.1 billion) innovate and streamline "so that we can innovate in new technologies and services for our customers, and be as effective and efficient as possible". The bank reckons the reorganisation could create 40 new positions.
Barclays promised that they would aim to redeploy affected workers across the company as much as possible. A spokesperson added: "Whilst regrettably this will mean job losses, we will make every effort to mitigate compulsory redundancies and are working closely with Unite and impacted staff."
Unite union officer David Fleming thundered: "The decision by Barclays Technology to cut 422 jobs is a New Year's blow for the staff. The vast majority of jobs will be going from Radbroke Hall, Cheshire. There will also be jobs cut in Northampton and a scattering among other sites around the country."
In November, Barclays Capital cut IT contractor rates by 10 per cent. Barclays employs 57,000 people in the UK. ®
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COMMENTS
Odd that
I have yet to hear of a company outsourcing its CEO and board of directors to a country where the salaries are much less. You could probably save 100's of millions in many cases.
Just once I'd like to see a company be honest about the reasons for job losses.
"We've only made 2% more profit this year and said to our shareholders it would be 3%, so in order not to disappoint them next year we figured we could make up that one percent more profit by shipping these roles off elsewhere in the world.
This is clearly worth the massive stressful impact to our soon-to-be-former staff and their families. Now excuse me, I'm off to the golf course in my private chauffered car"
Business Efficiency
The people that make these decisions don't see IT staff as real people any more, IT staff are just "Full Time Equivalents", entries on some spreadsheet, an expensive commodity they seem to think they can do with less of, whilst sending them more and more work at the same time, or offshoring the work because they think its cheaper. Then the poor souls that are left are expected to do more hours for the same pay and just be thankful they're still in a job.
Looks like...
... their one remaining Tech Support guy in an Indian Call Centre will be putting in a lot of overtime in the near future.
Optional
"The bank reckons the reorganisation could create 40 new positions."
The bank reckons the reorganisation could create -382 new positions.
There, fixed it for you.
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