UK Banking : Major Job Losses and the threat of strike action

to further sum up the attitudes of the senior management of HSBC i refer to this article:

"British call-centre workers are not up to the standards set by their colleagues in India or China, HSBC chief executive Sir Keith Whitson has said"

and.......

"Sir Keith insists British Jobs are not at risk"

Lies Lies Lies. Corporate Clowns!

Have they tried to say it was necessary for survival?

Unfortunately the people they will listen to are not cutomers- they are shareholders.

You may be unhappy about this, but your approach is similar to that of King Canute.

What kind of car do you drive? Where does your washing machine come from? What about your television?

Have you ever come across a poem about the holocaust that goes something like 'When they came for the gypsies I did nothing because I wasn't a gypsy.' It continues through several different groups then says something like 'When they came for me there was nobody left to do anything.'

I knew several farmers well who took great delight in the destruction of the miners. They also chuckled at all the stories about the British car industry. None of them would have driven anything but German cars- mainly BMW's. Then when the British farming industry hit hard times they produced stickers saying 'Buy British beef.' and wondered why the public didn't do as they were told.

Unfortunately times have changed, and all the growth is in service industries. Equally unfortunately many of them are relatively low skilled jobs that can transfer quite easily- like call centres. So we have to learn to move with the times, painful though it may be.

James

Not surprising since it's a relatively low skill job.

Any geographically mobile job is under threat when the cost of living in one country is high relative to another.

Now that's progress; it used to be a tenth.

They're not. You've made it up.

I suggest they're doing it because it makes commercial sense. Like anything else in business, it's a balance between the total cost of providing a service and the quality.

It appears that Asians provide a better quality service at a lower cost.

Why do you think HSBC should pay more for poorer service ?

What have you got against Asians ?

If the government attempts to create unfair trade barriers, do you not think it will provoke retaliation and risk a trade war ?

Quite easily. Look back through history and learn the lessons.

imo the UK should offer itself as an attractive environment for business with low cost of living, low personal & business taxation & high quality of life, to attract the higher level management of global companies that are utilising cheap overseas labour. This way the UK will have more chance of getting it's hands on some of the resulting profits. Lower levels of taxation lead to a greater total tax take.

Striking is simply a churlish reaction that does nothing to address the fundamentals.

Why do you think businesses that seek a better quality service for less cost are clowns ?

What concerns would those be then ? Perhaps HSBC will compromise & offer customers the option of using the UK call centres for an extra fee.

They are acting within the law, so they have fulfilled their social responsibilities.

They are acting in the best interests of the business, so they've fulfilled their economic responsibilities.

It won't make any difference unless they address the fundamental causes. Try - - reducing the cost of living in the UK (housing would be a good start) - increasing the cost of living in Asia

Indeed - with low unemployment it should be easy.

Daytona

And in the long run (maybe not that long) it will reach an equilibrium.

This all seems a little ironic given that HSBC used to stand for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, so it's a bit hard to see how it can be described as a UK company exporting jobs to Asia, more a case of an Asian company which saved a UK bank (Midland) from going under.

I'm surprised at how little appreciation there seems to be that unemployment is essentially zero in much of the country. The media seem determined to publicise even a few hundred redundancies, but rarely mention that the number of people with jobs is rising steadily. I hesitate to mention the ONS given their recent record, but I think their figures show over 600,000 vacancies, and the true level is probably quite a lot higher because people won't bother to advertise jobs they know they can't fill.

(I also don't notice many people prepared to march on the streets over the job insecurity of University researchers, so maybe I'm a bit biased :)