Yesterday's uproar about the number of redundancies linked to Unicredit recovery plan eases after a closer look at the group's strategy to decrease personnel costs. From the "cut" of 18.200 units in Italy we pass to 6.900 and then concretely drop to 540. This last number is the real novelty of the Unicredit plan as far as our country is concerned. And it probably won't even be about layoffs.
In fact, one of the objectives declared by the top management of the credit institution during the presentation of the Unicredit plan is to reach 111 work units by 2018. To achieve this goal, the managing director Ghizzoni explained that in the next three years the group will have 18.200 fewer employees than the current number, and of these 6.900 are in Italy. The vast majority of these redundancies had already been agreed upon for some time with the Italian trade unions, which however were taken aback by the new figures since, according to their calculations, there are 540 more redundancies compared to old agreements.
The unions are now asking Unicredit what will be the management methods of this new number of redundancies. Fabi, the main banking union said in a statement that it wants to reject “any hypothesis of compulsory exit of the workers. Any early retirements – we read – must be negotiated with the unions only on a voluntary and incentivized basis”.
More or less on the same wavelength First Cisl with First Cisl company coordination manager Pierluigi Ledda who asks to know immediately how the new group of outgoing workers will be managed. Ledda's hope is that such redundancies are, for example, voluntary early retirements and above all that they are accompanied by new hires. “There is no doubt that the world of banking has changed and that there is also a need for new professionals. For this reason it is important that in the face of voluntary early retirement there are also new hires. It would be an important signal: it would demonstrate that Unicredit still wants to invest in our country by focusing on hiring and not on mere cost cutting".
