Say “No” to Sleazy Bank Behaviour

I read a recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle, BofA: Train your replacement, or no severance pay for you written by David Lazarus about Bank of America’s decision to have their internal technical support staff train their Indian replacements.

Bank of America has been steadily moving thousands of tech jobs to India. The latest to go are about 100 positions that handle BofA’s internal tech support.

While many of the bank’s Bay Area techies accept the inevitability of their jobs heading abroad, what rankles them is the fact that, in many cases, they’re being told they have to first train the Indians who are getting their gigs.

“If people want their severance packages, they have to train their replacements,” a senior engineer at one of BofA’s Bay Area facilities told me [Lazarus]. “There’s nothing in writing that says this — the bank’s been careful about that. But it’s made clear at meetings what we’re supposed to do.”

This is simply sleazy behaviour. The only way I have to protest this is to pull my money (oh, the vast sums of glittering golden coins) out of Bank of America and write a letter to the branch manager (copied to some faceless minion at the corporate office). The saddest thing is that we really like the people who work in this local branch — they’ve been consistently helpful and very friendly.

So in the next day or two, Anna and I will be opening an account either with the Institute for Savings or another local bank. The additional benefit is these banks actually support Newburyport by sponsoring festivals and other events.

CEOs Feeling the Pain

According to an article on CNNMoney.com, Study: CEO pay grows at slower pace in `05, we should be feeling sorry for the poor CEO:

The total direct compensation for top corporate CEOs grew by nearly 16 percent last year, a significant increase that was still well below the 41 percent growth of the prior year, according to a survey of 350 major corporations conducted for the Wall Street Journal.

When was the last time you got a raise?

Hell Has Frozen Over

Beelzebub himself called to give me the news. In other news GM chief agrees to halve salary, BBC:

The chief executive of General Motors (GM) is to take a 50% pay cut to help the struggling carmaker save money.

Rick Wagoner and other executives have agreed to reduce their pay and forgo bonuses as part of radical measures aimed at improving GM’s finances.

If I hadn’t read it on the Beeb, I probably wouldn’t believe it. Of course, lots of other people (you know, the workers) payed a high price first:

Burdened with massive healthcare and pensions costs, GM has already announced 30,000 job losses and nine factory closures in North America.

So now in a last ditch effort to stay alive, Wagoner and the rest of the fat, overpayed executive “team” will cut their salaries and bonuses. The following just sounds so noble:

No executive directors will receive bonuses for the 2005 financial year

Maybe that would be because they did a terrible job? Nah. Couldn’t be.