Bank
and insurance workers at trade union Amicus are meeting today in Scarborough to
vote on industrial action over offshoring by banks and finance companies.
The
first target will be HSBC, which recently announced it will be cutting 3,500
jobs in the UK. This is on top of the 4,000 jobs it said late last year that it
would be transferring overseas.
Amicus
said that HSBC staff are showing ‘increasing unrest’ at having to rectify
mistakes made by overseas back-office operations. It is planning a summer of
action as it targets one bank after another.
David
Fleming, Amicus national officer, said: "You can almost taste the anger
among workers who have seen executive pay and benefits go through the roof and
have paid for it with wage freezes, pension scheme cuts and the fear that their
jobs are going to be offshored half-way round the world."
Last
month, Amicus merged with Unifi to form a 250,000-strong single union.
