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.