Monday 14 February 2011

Lloyds bank under fire over 200 more job cuts

The part-nationalised banking giant Lloyds has been criticised by trade unions for their announcement last week that they are to cut another 200 jobs in the near future.


The announcement is the latest in a long-line of job cuts by the banking group. Lloyds has cut over 21,000 jobs since 2009 when it merged with HBOS.

HBOS is a banking and insurance company that is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Lloyds Banking Group. It is the holding company for the Bank of Scotland, which operates the Bank of Scotland and Halifax in the UK.

Lloyds say the job cuts are necessary as part of their three year integration programme which is due to end in the final months of this year.

A statement from the banking group said that it was committed to walking their staff through the changes in a “careful and sensitive” way. It said the company's policy is to allow natural turnover and redeployment as the favoured way of making the necessary changes. In addition, it has tried to reduce the use of agency staff and contractors to minimise the effect on permanent employees.

However, “where it is necessary for employees to leave the company, it will look to achieving this by offering voluntary severance. Compulsory redundancies will always be a last resort.”

An employer can only implement forced redundancies in certain situations. Essentially, for forced redundancy to be legitimate the job must no longer exist or it must be justified by the need to cut costs.

A situation where 20 or more employees are being made redundant is called a collective redundancy. The usual reasons for collective redundancies are a business closure or, as in the case of Lloyds, a business reorganisation or reallocation of work.

Lloyds said that the “overwhelming majority of role reductions has been achieved through redeployment, natural turnover, closing vacancies, expiration of temporary contracts, and voluntary redundancy”.

However, the national trade union Unite is calling for the 200 jobs to be saved.

The national officer for Unite, David Fleming, said it is “inexcusable” that the head of the Lloyds Banking Group, Antonio Horta-Osorio, receives an annual salary of £8.3 million and yet has done nothing to prevent employees earning an average of £20,000 per year from losing their jobs.

And to add insult to injury, the group is tax-payer supported after it was part-nationalised following the banking crisis in 2008.

Unite said the job losses will from group operations, general insurance and wholesale. The affected areas will include Shannon, Edinburgh, Newport, and West Yorkshire.

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