Barclays Bank has announced 2,100 job cuts, which
include IT roles, in its retail and commercial business a day after
news of the same number being cut in investment banking
yesterday.
These jobs include at least 400 IT workers.
This brings the total job cuts revealed this week to 4,200. A
Barclays spokeswoman said that the retail and commercial banking
cuts could include IT jobs but the investment banking probably will
not. "The only definite IT job cuts are the
400 announced last week which are part of [the 4,200]." But she
did not rule out more.
This 400 included 150 in-house IT jobs and 250 contractors from
its Global Infrastructure Delivery (GISD)unit. The company said
some of these jobs had become obsolete and others were
duplications.
The spokeswoman said the bank will attempt to limit the
redundancies. She said many of the roles being cut are only
vacancies, others are contractors with six month contracts and the
bank will try to redeploy people.
"We expect the final number of compulsory redundancies to be
significantly lower than the numbers reported in the media. In 2008
we announced 2,500 job cuts but by the end of the year our total
employee number increased by 8,000," she added.
Keith Brooks, general secretary for Barclays at union Unite said
this could be part of the bank's announcement last year that it
would offshore
1,800 jobs at Barclays GISD.
Brooks said about 700 of these jobs have already been cut.
"There are another 1,100 planned, unless the bank has changed its
mind."
Barclays said all the GISD cuts would be made by 2010.
Unite deputy general secretary Graham Goddard has called for
Barclays to inform the union of its plans."Barclays needs to come
clean and end its strategy of death by a thousand cuts," he
said.