By Chris Zappone

Westpac employees are bracing for the loss of as many as triple the number of job losses already announced this week as the bank adjusts to a weak economy and higher funding costs.

As many as 1500 more positions could be at risk, adding to the cuts of 560 already announced.

“We’re conducting consultations to a number of our employees around changes to our staff,” said a spokeswoman for the bank.

The bank has been cutting jobs since the end of last year, when it shifted about 200 back-office jobs offshore.

On January 19, a spokeswoman for the bank said the bank planned to cull more positions this year.

“We can expect that staff numbers will decrease as we reduce higher cost contract-based staff and reduce duplication in roles at head offices,” she said.

Analysts from UBS tip that as many as 7000 banking jobs may be shed in Australia in the next two years, as demand for loans slows and households reduce debt levels.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/westpac-set-to-announce-job-cuts-20120202-1qulx.html#ixzz1lBm7oHKx

By Martin Conboy, President – Australian BPO Association (ABPOA)

The final stages of the Australian summer holidays are here, and we are starting to notice that the traffic is getting heavier as Australia gets into first gear and gets ready for 2012. Here’s hoping that Europe can muddle its way through and not bring the whole show crashing down around us. At least the US is showing signs of gentle improvement.

With the US Presidential elections looming, we can expect to hear a lot more rhetoric about offshoring being un-American and saving jobs, etc. until such time as sanity prevails and the Presidential election is over.

The American government offering incentives for firms not to offshore completely misses the point. Somebody somewhere has to pay for the subsidy (usually the tax payers) and all it does is mask an inefficient labour market. How on earth is a government going to force private industry not to operate its own best interests. Having said that, it’s not possible to turn a bunch of skilled factory workers in too much needed nurses as an example. The problem is that America has millions of jobs, but the millions of unemployed American do not have the required skills to do them. So companies look to India and the Philippines for the people with the required skills.

The simple fact of the matter is that global labour markets have restructured and highly skilled and less expensive Asian knowledge workers can and will do the work required of them. Gone are the days when Asia was a place where low value business processes were sent as a labour arbitrage play. The intellectual horsepower in Asia is immense, and it’s understandable that in an age of cloud-based technologies coming into their own, companies would want to tap into these highly skilled workforces.

People in first world nations can complain about it all they want, but the drivers of BPO are very well-known and have been well-ventilated over the last couple of years. The world is governed by self-interest, and that is the nub of the issue.

It’s cold comfort for the man on the street for sure, but the world does not owe us a living, at the man on the street level social dislocation and society restructuring is hard to understand. Be that as it may, we are part of a global market. The world is changing whether we like it or not, and there will be local causalities. Yes, we must have safety nets for our fellow Australians who get caught out, but change is coming and of that there is no doubt.

A case in point is the Australian Car Manufacturing sector which is being propped up by government subsidies. For the foreseeable future we will still keep throwing money at it, and yes people will argue that there is the multiplier effect of all of the allied industries that making a living supplying the industry. But the reality is that people in other countries make better cars than we do and they cost less, so it does not make sense to make cars here because the market will buy the better-made cheaper cars anyway. So all we have done is thrown good money after bad, instead of retraining our workforces to get them ready for the future.

It is subsidies and government policies supporting economical unviable industries that got Europe into the mess that it’s currently in.

So it follows with BPO, if companies can access talented and less expensive labour in somewhere like the Philippines, why would a business pay more for the same thing in their own country?

The shareholders of businesses expect to pay the least amount that they can to operate their business and have a duty to employ the least amount of people necessary to make their business work.

Australian bank Westpac confirmed 188 local jobs would be affected by a shift in its technology sourcing strategy which is slated to see some internal work handed off to external suppliers.

Last week the bank’s chief executive Gail Kelly revealed it was in the advanced stages of working through a change to its sourcing strategy for application development services. Although at the time Kelly acknowledged some jobs would be affected, the executive didn’t go into detail as to precisely what the bank’s new strategy would entail. Yesterday some of those details started to become clear, with the Financial Services Union, which counts some Westpac staff amongst its members, issuing a statement claiming the cuts were slated to affect 188 staff.

“Earlier this week Westpac announced to staff that we were changing the way we outsourced some roles for Enterprise Testing Services in one part of our technology business,” confirmed a statement by Westpac this afternoon. “As part of the initial consultation process, we outlined that there will be around 188 roles in scope as part of the new sourcing arrangements we are transitioning to.”

The union claimed the job cuts were part of “an 18 month-long program” of reducing Westpac roles, and replacing those roles with outsourced and offshore providers. And, it pointed out, the cuts came in the wake of Westpac announcing a record net profit of $6.9 billion.

Furthermore, the union claimed Westpac had attempted similar outsourcing initiatives previously, but failed. “What makes this announcement more surprising is that Westpac itself has recognised that past outsourcing and offshoring of jobs has failed, as evidenced by 600 jobs previously outsourced to HP in Adelaide being returned to Westpac,” the union wrote. “Short term cost savings don’t add up in the long run, and Westpac should recognise that this is also the case with this latest decision to outsource and offshore IT jobs.”

The bank said the future of its outsourcing initiative was not yet clear. “The final impact on our Full-time staff will not be known for a number of months as we work through the transition,” the bank said. “Where there are reductions in roles, we will use natural attrition where possible, redeploy employees to other roles, and reduce temporary/contract staff first to minimise the overall impact on our technology workforce. The majority of these in-scope roles will come from head-office in Sydney.”

Source: Delimiter

Salmat has launched a company-wide program aimed at bridging the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. The Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP) will see the implementation of a range of activities supporting indigenous Australians over the next 12 months and is one of the ways in which Salmat is contributing to the reconciliation process in Australia.

‘Our Vision for Reconciliation is based on compassion, respect, commitment to diversity and acknowledging the significant role of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people play in Australian society. As an organization we are committed to closing the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians, by breaking down barriers, establishing relationships with local Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, creating opportunities, celebrating and welcoming all Australians and most of all promoting inclusion throughout our workplace,’ said Grant Harrod, Chief Executive Officer of Salmat.

‘During the next year we will be recruiting more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employees and helping indigenous business from around the country take advantage of our business experience and expertise,’ he said.

The Australian Government has thrown its support behind the initiative with the Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, the Hon Jenny Macklin MP, commending Salmat for taking the initiative to prepare a Reconciliation Action Plan.

Salmat’s RAP program builds on the company’s strong commitment to local indigenous communities. Initiatives in place include supporting indigenous businesses, increasing employment of indigenous Australians and volunteer programs for staff.

Salmat hopes to employ 30 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people across the business and rollout an indigenous work experience program by August 2012. Other initiatives include developing an Indigenous procurement policy to engage Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander businesses, provide staff with secondment opportunities to work with indigenous communities and widespread cultural education programs.

By Kelly Burke

Garry Brack … unions push a cause which “relies on labour shortages to drive wages up”.

ALMOST two thirds of large companies are considering hiring staff from overseas to overcome skills shortages, according to a recent national salary survey by the Australian Institute of Management.

Recruiting difficulties are chronic in construction and engineering, sales and marketing and manufacturing/trades, but primarily at the professional and technical level, not at the blue-collar level.

Nurses, childcare workers, cooks, hairdressers and butchers are also in short supply, according to the most recent skill shortage list published by the federal government.

But Malcolm Tulloch, the state secretary of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, said the labour shortage was a “furphy”. “It’s just a ruse to bring in foreign workers on cheaper rates and drive the wages and conditions down,” he said.

He conceded, however, that there was a problem in the way school leavers were being trained.

“Companies don’t commit to providing resources to train Australian school leavers,” he said. “There has been a neglect in this [area] for well over a decade and now Australia is feeling the pinch.”

The chief executive of the Australian Federation of Employers and Industries, Garry Brack, said Mr.

Tulloch’s comments were pushing the union cause, which relied on labour shortages to drive wages up. As the resources sector continued to expand, the construction industry in particular would suffer increased difficulties in filling jobs because of the higher wages offered by mining companies, he said.

Wilhelm Harnisch, the chief executive of Master Builders Australia, agreed, calculating that in the next five to 10 years, the mining sector would recruit an extra 60,000 to 80,000 workers, and those from the construction industry were a natural fit.

“With a building workforce of a million, it will certainly hit us hard,” Mr. Harnisch said. “It will not be as catastrophic as some are saying, but [it] is a concern.”

Of equal concern was the structural shortage within the industry, he said, as baby boomers retire from the physically strenuous industry and the dropout rate among apprentices continues to be as high as 50 per cent.

Mr. Harnisch said low starting wages, unmet expectations of school leavers and poor training were behind the dropout rate.

A spokeswoman from the Professional Hairdressers Association said her industry had a similar dropout problem, which had created a labour shortage.

“There are complaints about lower wages, but also a lot of salons don’t run their businesses like businesses,” the spokeswoman said. “They don’t really want an apprentice; they just want a helping hand.”
Robin Shreeve, the chief executive of Skills Australia, said there was an urgent need to better train the domestic population.

“We’re urging the government to put more money into tertiary and skills education,” he said. “Specialised occupations can take a long time to meet licensing and regulatory obligations, so short-term skilled migration has to be a balancing factor.”

Source: Sydney Morning Herald