ABN Amro cutting all temporary workers in financial crimes department
ABN Amro is cutting all temporary workers in its financial crime investigation team. The bank is ending its collaboration with specialized secondment and staffing agencies involved in this department, the Financieele Dagblad reported.
Earlier this month, ABN Amro also announced layoffs in its sustainability department, cutting 58 permanent employees and 9 temporary workers. The bank warned that it expected to do “further optimization” in other departments.
The bank also announced in April that it was ending external hiring and not renewing temporary contracts. At the time, it spared the department that investigated signs of criminal money flows, money laundering, and terrorist funding. But it now sees room to reduce staffing there after shifting to doing some of the detecting work using technology, setting up the Detecting Financial Crime system for the purpose.
ABN Amro also reportedly decided to eliminate more temporary workers because the new collective labor agreement for the temporary employment sector will lead to higher costs for the bank. The agreement takes effect next year and stipulates equal pay for permanent employees and temporary workers. With the costs of external hiring on top of the equal pay, temporary workers will be more expensive than permanent staff.
According to the newspaper, the bank offered to take over some of the temporary workers into permanent employment, but there will be new layoffs. How many is unclear. The involved staffing agencies told FD that the announcement caught them off guard.
Last week, the trade union CNV warned that the Netherlands was on the verge of several massive layoff rounds. At least a third of the businesses with which CNV negotiates have layoffs on the table. Thousands of jobs may be at risk, especially in financial services, industry, retail, and education, CNV chairman Piet Fortuin said.
