Unite for
Jobs for finance workers
Finance sector workers continue to be hit badly by the global
financial crisis.
There has been considerable public outrage over the level of
taxpayers’ money being invested in the banking sector, specifically
when other sectors of the economy are equally feeling the
strain.
The Government’s Asset Protection Scheme has seen taxpayers
insured against future finance losses to the tune of around £585
billion. The value of the assets covered equates to about
£10,000 a head for every man, woman and child in the country.
This is roughly 6.5 times the annual budget for the National
Health Service – or equivalent to the country’s entire national
debt.
Yet this money has not secured any jobs in the financial
services sector and workers continue to pay the price for economic
downturn.
We now have a situation where:
- Northern Rock remains a nationalised company.
- Royal Bank of Scotland is 70% publicly owned and
- Lloyds Banking Group is 58% publicly owned.
The crisis of confidence in the financial services industry
impacts nobody more than the hard-working staff in the sector. They
understand that the sector has lost its integrity in the eyes of
the public and this will take some considerable time to regain.
But the crisis in the financial services industry does not just
impact those who work in the sector. The knock-on effect of the
lack of liquidity in the sector has been acutely felt by businesses
across the country with even those with healthy order books finding
it difficult to obtain credit or new lending from the banks.
This has resulted in large scale job losses across a number of
industrial sectors including retail and manufacturing
industries.
Significant job losses have been reported across the sector with
around 40,000 jobs lost in the past 6 months with some projecting
further job losses of over 100,000 in the next 2 years.
Recently, we’ve seen in HSBC 2,900 jobs lost, RBOS 4,500 jobs lost,
Aviva 1,100 jobs lost, Royal and Sun Alliance 1,200 jobs lost.
We now need a clear programme for jobs to support finance sector
workers through the economic downturn.
The government took action to fix our broken finance system -
now we need them to do more to help ordinary people weather the
economic storm.
This is about OUR futures. That is why it is so important that
people send a clear message to the government that we want jobs to
be its number one priority.
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