More Black Country jobs to go as Lloyds wields the axe

UNIONS have reacted angrily to the latest round of job cuts at Lloyds Bank, which has left workers in Wolverhampton worried for their future.

The bank has announced plans to cut 625 jobs across several divisions. The move follows a decision to offshore IT roles to India.

The Unite union said the move represented a dangerous ‘race to the bottom’.

It said the cuts included the offshoring of up to 82 roles in IT departments to the bank’s operations in India.
 
The latest announcement is part of the programme of 9,000 job cuts announced by the bank in 2014. The redundancies will be will be followed by a recruitment freeze in several divisions, while many remaining staff will be asked to go through an ‘assessment and selection’ process, which the union said would increase concerns of more cuts.
 
Other impacted divisions include Consumer Finance, Commercial Banking, Group Risk, and People, Legal & Strategy, impacting the bank’s back office sites in London, Brighton, Gloucester, Leeds, Halifax and Wolverhampton.
 
The union said the cuts were taking a heavy toll on the remaining workforce, where three quarters (74%) of bank staff have reported symptoms of work-related stress, while 80% had reported having to work additional unpaid overtime every week to keep up with a rising workload.
 
It also claimed that recent IT ‘glitches’ across the major banks had proven that offshoring IT support in the name of cost efficiency could have major implications for both the banks and their customers.

John Morgan-Evans, Unite Regional Officer, said: “It is alarming that Lloyds are continuing to offshore IT roles in the name of driving down cost. This simply means that the bank want to pay an IT worker in India less for the same work carried out in the UK. This disastrous race to the bottom hurts our members and inevitably impacts customers.
 
“Unite has made it clear that ‘efficiency’ cannot simply mean axing more jobs while expecting the same work to fall on fewer shoulders. The bank forgets that these relentless cuts have a human cost. Unpaid overtime and work-related stress are already at endemic levels across the bank and this will reach a crisis point if Lloyds continue to swing the axe.”

The concerns mark another day of employment misery for the Black Country, coming so quickly on the bombshell announcement by British Gas that it is pulling the plug on its Oldbury calls centre threatening the jobs of hundreds of workers.