ARCHIVED - Banco Sabadell will leave only 46 branches open in Murcia region within mass redundancy
Murcia will lose 35 full-time offices by October with reduced hours in a further 24
One of Spain’s largest financial institutions, Banco Sabadell, announced in August that it planned to close 35 offices in the region by October, in addition to reducing the opening days of 24 others as part of a wide-ranging ERE redundancy across Spain.
The company plans to save 100 million euros a year in costs by reducing its high street presence, closing low viability branches, many of which came under its control during the fusion with the former CAM bank (Caja de Ahorros del Mediterráneo) and are located in the Murcia region and Alicante province.
A period of negotiation was opened during which staff willing to accept voluntary redundancy could communicate their intention and the unions could negotiate with the bank, but when the communication period concluded on September 2 the final redundancy plans of the bank were made known to the unions, the final proposal being for almost 500 branches to close nationwide and for 1,639 staff to be made redundant.
The final result for the Murcia region is that the Banco Sabadell will lay off 153 workers and close 59 offices in the Region, leaving only 46 branches open.
At the end of 2020, the financial institution had a total of 1,614 offices in Spain, so will conclude 2021 with the closure of 30 per cent of its branches. Last year, Sabadell had 112 offices in the Region of Murcia and employed 790 staff. With the national shift towards online and remote banking, the company offered its staff voluntary redundancy packages that same year, after which the workforce was reduced to 696 employees.
In July this year, Sabadell closed 24 branches and in October it plans to close the shutters on another 11, so a total of 35 offices will disappear, which is almost a third of the bank’s network in the Murcia region. This is in addition to the 24 branches that will only offer cashpoint services and a very limited administrative service with shared personnel.
Paqui Corbalán, representative of the CCOO union, claimed that there are no logical reasons for Sabadell’s cutbacks considering the institution made a net profit in the region of 220 million euros in the first half of 2021 and has dismissed the bank’s claims that the growing use of digital banking has irreparably hurt the branches.
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