Bob Staff Withdraw Stir On No Job Cut Now Promise

Employees of Bank of Baroda (BoB) have withdrawn their one-day strike call of March 30, 2002 following the management's assurance that there were no immediate plans for a voluntary retirement scheme (VRS) to prune the workforce by 15,000.

The employees were up in arms as the bank's information technology (IT) consultant, Gartner, had, in its report, suggested that BoB would need to dramatically change the composition and structure of its workforce in order to meet the future demands and changing nature of the customer base.

Gartner had said that a combination of process re-engineering, implementing core banking systems and web-enabling of processes would enable the bank to offer 'VRS (n)' that would trim the workforce from 40,000 to 25,000.

 

The unions - the All India BoB Officers' Association, All India BoB Employees' Federation, All India BoB Employees' Co-ordination Committee and the Eastern Regional Council of BoB Employees' Associations - said that they were not against the appointment of a consultant to suggest a long-term IT strategy.

"What we are opposed to is the surreptitious way in which the management assigned the work of formulating a business strategy for the bank notwithstanding the fact that Gartner does not have the requisite expertise or any past experience of advising a bank anytime," they said.

The unions pointed out that the IT consultant had not quantified the benefits that will accrue to the bank through the strategies outlined by it and that it was not interested in developing in-house expertise and proposed to outsource services as well as skilled workers.

Earlier, the US-based infotech consultancy major Gartner had recommended that BoB lop off its workforce by 15,000 through a fresh VRS. In percentage terms, this was 37 per cent of the bank's payroll strength of 40,000.

Gartner was hired by the bank in this financial year to chalk out a business-driven infotech strategy, which could be implemented through a combination of business process re-engineering, implementing core banking systems, web-enabling and a series of VRS.

P S Shenoy, chairman and managing director, BoB, said: "The thrust of the report was on rightsizing and Gartner has shown how productivity can go up. We have not taken any decision on the VRS. As of now, there is no plan to introduce the scheme."

BoB, which shed 7,054 employees through the first-ever VRS in the industry last year, will need to dramatically change the composition and structure of its workforce to meet the demands and changing nature of customer base and restructuring of its operations, Gartner said in its report.

The consulting firm said the transition of branch-based transaction processing to centralised data or transaction processing centres within India will be crucial to attain the targeted workforce and associated productivity improvement.