Unicaja Bank will output through the Employment Regulation File (ERE) agreed with the unions around 1,100 office employees and about 400 central services, as union sources have explained to this newspaper after the financial entity has communicated this Friday individually to the workers who asked to be included in it if their application for membership has been admitted or not. The distribution differs slightly from the one that the bank originally proposed when it began to negotiate the file with the unions last fall, since then there was talk of 1,005 people from the branch segment and 508 from central services. These sources have also explained that in areas such as Madrid, Asturias, Barcelona and Malaga the number of requests has far exceeded that of the surplus that was fixed in the technical report of the ERE, with which there are exit requests that could not be attended.
In fact, they add, there are already some cases of people who have not been included in the file who have shown their willingness to file an individual claim, understanding that the planned order of priority has not been met (and that it was ordered by descending age brackets). Apparently, these guidelines have prevailed more in the office segment, but not so much in the central services segment. In any case, the bank reserved at the time to be able to skip that rule at some point due to organizational needs if in some provinces there were more adhesions than the surplus detected. The unions will hold in the coming weeks new meetings in the monitoring commission of the agreement, where it will be possible to know what the entity decides to do with those particular claims.
According to EFE reports, in the opposite side are communities such as Castilla-La Mancha, in which the exit request has been granted to the majority of people who have asked to leave the entity by the ERE, mainly in the provinces of Cuenca, Toledo and Ciudad Real. Other provinces such as León had more surpluses available than requests, so there have been places available to leave although, in general, there have been no “alarming” differences between requests and surpluses, these sources highlight.
On January 15, the company closed the deadline to benefit from the ERE with 2,082 requests received, when the maximum number of departures stipulated in the file is 1,513. During these last weeks, the bank has been examining these requests to verify that there was a minimum number of people who met the criteria set in the ERE and deciding the selection of the candidates. All departures will thus be voluntary through the formula of incentivized dismissals due to termination of the contract. The entity has thus had to reject just over 550 applications.
Some trade union voices have commented that a good part of the 1,513 departures planned in the ERE (about 700) will take place before this summer, a date on which the integration of the Unicaja and former Liberbank platforms is also planned. Other sources, however, affirm that, although they know that the entity intends to accelerate a good part of the contract terminations, the number of workers that will leave in this first phase of execution of the ERE is not yet known.
The term of execution of the measures will be until December 31, 2024. Unicaja Banco had the possibility of informing those affected about the specific date of termination of their contract by informing them that their adhesion had been accepted or doing so at a later date. In the individual communications of this Friday, as it had been commented, no date has been indicated. The bank must always have a minimum notice of 30 days.
As for the province of Malaga, Some union estimates already indicated on Thursday that there could be more than 150 requests for office staff in the province, while the needs of the ERE would be only about 100 exits. However, the impact of the ERE on the central services, where Malaga has many workers (about 1,000, distributed between Malaga capital and Ronda), and the number of applications that have been in this section remain to be known.
The unions, in addition, have been showing during these months their “fear” that the entity’s management intends in the future to outsource part of the central services by resorting to subcontractors belonging to the group and from the former Liberbank.