____________________________________________________________________________.....

10/26/2007....
Call to protect bank staff from Brazil to the Netherlands

- Labour news from UNI global union - for trade unions in a global services economy. -

Vagner Freitas

Rob McGregor
Fifty five thousand finance workers in Brazil are among those who will be at the sharp end of the ABN Amro takeover by a consortium of three European banks - Fortis, Royal Bank of Scotland and Santander.
The staff currently work for ABN Amro in Brazil (32,000) and Santander Bank (23,000) and the operations are expected to be merged in this biggest ever bank takeover in which ABN Amro will be dismembered and the parts merged into the three consortium banks.
400,000 workers in the four existing banks will be affected by the takeover, the splitting up of ABN Amro and the integration processes - either directly or indirectly - and the consortium has said that initially 19,000 jobs worldwide will go.
Thousands of jobs in the Netherlands are also most at risk with the merging of operations of ABN Amro and Fortis.
“It’s important that we pre-empt matters,” UNI-Americas Finance President Vagner Freitas de Moraes (CONTRAF Brazil) told the UNI World Executive during its first ever session in India.
“We have to organise our own workers and we need help from the Executive so that Santander does not carry on decimating jobs,” said Vagner.
The Executive backed calls for negotiations to tackle the consequences of the takeover with a particular focus on redundancies.
“Our first priority is no compulsory redundancies - there is no reason for any worker to be forced out of his job,” said Rob McGregor of Unite UK, which has a collective agreement with RBS bank, which made 14bn euro profits last year.
Global cooperation between bank unions affected by the takeover was launched during the drawn out bid battle in which another UK bank - Barclays - ultimately failed in what was originally a friendly merger with ABN Amro.
UNI Finance with unions from both sides of the Atlantic met top Barclays and RBS/consortium management during the summer.
In its resolution the Executive endorsed the call by UNI Finance for global agreements with the individual banks to ensure labour rights wherever they operate.
“This is a unique challenge for the trade union movement and we shall be working hard to ensure that the integration process is transparent and the negotiations meaningful for finance workers around the globe,” said UNI Finance President Allan Bang after the Executive debate.








    ...
    ____________________________________________________________________________.....

    UNi-Asia & Pacific (UNI-Apro)
    http://www.uni-apro.org - uni-asiapacific@union-network.org
    .