With the ERE of Unicaja that ends on Saturday, more than 18,000 workers leave the financial entities.
Unicaja closes next Saturday the employment regulation file (ERE) to 1,500 employees motivated by the merger with Liberbank. With him, another black year culminates in Spanish banking in terms of job cuts. More than 18,000 workers of the main financial institutions are going to go to the streets due to mergers or changes in functions caused by the digitization process of banking activity.
In this way, last year became the year with more layoffs or early retirements in the Spanish financial sector. Only 2013 is close, with 18,300 layoffs and layoffs due to early retirement. Proportionally, in addition, the employment crisis is much greater now if we take into account that between 2008-2009, -the years of the financial crisis that caused, among other things, the disappearance of savings banks- and last year the sector bank has already lost more than 120,000 workers.
The fundamental characteristic of this wave is that in most cases these processes have resulted in voluntary leave, after there were more exit requests than number of layoffs. The conditions offered by the entities and the new skills required by the positions that are created mean that many employees over 50 years of age prefer to take advantage of the files or request early retirement without waiting for the bank to make the decision.
For example, CaixaBank received more than 8,200 voluntary requests for 6,542 withdrawals contemplated by the ERE; BBVA, 5,216 for 2,735 and Sabadell, about 2,100 for the 1,605 people (not counting early retirements at the end of 2020). At Santander, 99% of the leave agreed in its ERE have also been of a voluntary nature. Overall, the excess demand for voluntary departures has been higher than 40% of the withdrawals agreed between the unions and the financial entities.
Banks want rejuvenate template and they pose generous terms for their older workers. This rejuvenation means, on the one hand, that personnel more adapted to the new conditions of the banking business enter, especially in the use of internet banking and, on the other, that they join with lower salaries and with much less advantageous agreements to workers than those that banking has always had in our country.
The favorable conditions offered by the banks will represent a joint disbursement of some 5,000 million euros, CaixaBank will be the one to spend the most for this concept, 1,900 million euros. Santander is the second that has devoted the most money to staff adjustment, with 1,146 million, while the cost for BBVA was 960 million euros. in Unicaja there are 368 million; at Banco Sabadell, 269 million, and at Ibercaja, 151 million euros. This disbursement will be recovered with the savings expected for the next few years.
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