Banks shedding jobs on the quiet

But rather than announcing them in one hit, the banks made 242 announcements.

NAB has shed 1138 staff in 164 rounds of redundancies, and ANZ announced 60 restructures over the year resulting in 1718 job losses. CBA had only eight restructures and 151 cuts, the fewest of the four. Westpac made 302 staff redundant via 10 announcements, but the union said the bank lost almost 1000 more jobs through natural attrition.

The banks defended the cuts amid slowing growth, but the union warned it would affect customer service.Union state president Geoff Derrick said the staggered redundancy notices were battering staff morale.

“This demonstrates very clearly there is an agenda here about cutting jobs,” he said.

Positions being cut include IT staff and staff responsible for internet banking; ensuring security is in place for mortgages and for checking pays go in on time and that transactions are accurate.

NAB said it was natural for staff to fluctuate in a large business. “Due to a continuing focus on efficiency programs, outsourcing of some technology functions and completion of programs, there were a total of 553 less full-time employees at NAB in September 2011 compared to September 2010,” a spokesman said.

Westpac said it was “adjusting” to the lower growth environment. “This includes increasing our resource flexibility to enable us to respond to changing business needs and technologies, reducing our higher cost contractor base, improving our skill capability by leveraging global scale of sourcing providers and reducing duplication of roles.”

It said it also planned to bring some outsourced roles back into the business.

CBA said it had increased fulltime equivalent staff from 45,025 to 46,060 in 2010-11.