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A slight rally for IT freelancers in financial services has been marred by one of the sector’s part-nationalised banks making hundreds of IT contractors jobless. Speaking last week, days after the upturn emerged, Lloyds Banking Group confirmed to CUK that it had swung its jobs axe on 370 contract roles, mostly in IT support. The cuts, which will be achieved by shedding agency and contract staff, are on top of the 400 contract job losses that the group has announced in the past few months. The latest round of cuts means that since Lloyds TSB fused with HBOS, and created a single IT operation, 8,200 staff have been let go, including almost 800 IT contractors. A spokesperson for Lloyds Banking Group was unable to cite how many of the 15,000 incoming lay-offs that unions expect were likely to affect temporary IT staff. Yet in a statement, the group hinted that its IT freelancers, who can be dismissed more easily than permanent staff, would take the fall for their full-time counterparts. It said: “The group’s policy is to use natural turnover and to redeploy people wherever possible to retain their expertise and knowledge within the group. “Where it is necessary for colleagues to leave the company, it will look to achieve this by making less use of contractors and agency colleagues.” The move will unsettle the group’s surviving IT contractors, who, aside from the layoffs, have already been subject to two pay cuts, totalling 20% , within the last year. Speaking up for the workforce, Unite demanded a freeze on the expansion of work done abroad by the group, just at a time when its UK staff faced an “uncertain future.” But the call has been ignored, as the Lloyds TSB Group Union (LTU) understands that, despite closing 659 IT roles in the UK to cut costs, the banking group is maintaining its staff level in India. LTU said :“Even though both the bank’s IT and collections and recoveries operations are directly supported by well over a thousand staff based in India – and the bank flying into the UK many more IT staff from India who are paid low salaries – the axe has fallen entirely on the jobs of UK staff. “So for instance, whilst Collections & Recoveries intends to reduce from 8 to 6 the number of sites in the UK that it intends to operate from – exiting sites in Andover and Southend – it is insisting upon leaving the 3 operations in India untouched.” Both unions agreed that the weekly cull of staff by Lloyds Banking Group, which is 43%-owned by the public, represented a betrayal to the taxpayer. Unite said: “Today staff in the IT, life and pensions and operations departments face the reality that LBG is operating centres abroad while they are told that their jobs are redundant. “It is essential that these taxpayer-funded institutions are radically overhauled to ensure that the sector’s corporate governance regime is fit for purpose.” Lloyds last week said that all affected IT contractors have already been briefed by their line managers, and promised that the “changes” would be managed “sensitively.” More positively, these IT contractors are re-entering the jobs market at a time when other financial institutions are beginning to quicken their flagging pace of hiring temporary IT staff. In fact, although the number of IT contractor job offers by financers is still down 40% on this time last year, demand for their skills in June leapt 50% on the previous month, ending a 12-month decline. “Things haven't returned to last year's levels but there are plenty of jobs out there,” said Powerchex, a pre-screening firm for 300 IT-using financers, reflecting on its findings. Technology recruitment agents at Hudson, which works with more than 100 financial institutions, agreed that the current outlook for financial IT contractors had improved in recent weeks. “Things do seem to be picking up in financial services,” said Paul Elworthy, a director of the firm’s banking IT recruitment arm, which focuses on London, the Midlands, Scotland and Ireland. He said that since some of the City’s major banking institutions announced “decent results”, IT contractor hiring had become “more favourable” than permanent IT hiring. Simon Walker, a director of IT recruiter Project Partners, explained to eFinancialCareers: “Over the last month we've seen a number of non-business critical IT projects that were shut down last year begin to come back again and firms are taking on contractors for these. “This, coupled with the ongoing change management work, has meant a decent demand for interim staff within financial services.” Alexandra Kelly, Powerchex’s founder, added: “Firms have been recruiting quite aggressively recently as the economic situation stabilises and they attempt to make the most of a very talented pool of people who are desperate for work.” Jul 22, 2009 Email this article Printer friendly page Previous Page
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