Santander has not reached an agreement with 350 workers and is proceeding with a ‘unilateral operation’

In an internal memo to the Executive Committee, which Lusa had access to, this body announced that “according to the calculations made to date, there are approximately 350 employees (of the 685 initially planned for inclusion in the restructuring plan) who did not accept the offer.” drafted by the bank.

The same memo adds that “the opinion of the National Workers’ Committee before the application of unilateral measures to reduce the number of workers” in the enterprise has already been requested today, under the legal conditions.

The Executive Committee noted that “the formal unilateral process that it will follow will focus only on employees covered by the restructuring plan and who have decided not to reach an agreement with the Bank, and will start in the first days of September.”

In the same note, Santander noted that Thursday had ended “the period stipulated in the bank’s restructuring plan for the submission of responses by covered employees.”

The institution also ensured, “As stated in the June 29 statement, for each of the covered employees, defined according to transparent and objective criteria, the bank provided the best conditions in the market, and proposes early retirement for employees over 55 years of age, including the value of the agreements. Cancellation, as for other employees, is compensation containing a portion corresponding to the estimated total amount of unemployment benefit.”

Santander workers can respond to the proposal to leave until Thursday, as part of the bank’s restructuring plan, and the number of departures may reach 1,200, according to information from the head of the bank, submitted to Parliament.

Several numbers have already been submitted within the scope of this process. On June 29, the enterprise restructuring plan was approved, which provided for the departure of 685 workers, the “best market conditions” were presented, according to a note from the bank’s executive committee, to which Lusa had access at that time. . The subject of the dispute is workers from various areas of the central services and the commercial network of the bank, including those who were covered by the unilateral action. These shareholders were notified by July 15.

On July 30, it was reported that about 1,200 workers were scheduled to leave Santander Tota this year, according to calculations and semi-annual information presented by the head of the bank in Parliament. According to the calculations for the first half (profit 81.4 million euros), between January and June 215 workers left, and Santander Tota had 5,765 employees in June.

The President of the Bank, Pedro Castro e Almeida, said at a hearing in Parliament, in the Action Committee, that the current restructuring program anticipates the departure of nearly 600 workers (by mutual agreement and early retirement), who were selected on the basis of the assessment of the past three years.

The manager said the number was below the initially planned targets (first 1,000 exits and then 685) and that the voluntary terminations the bank had previously had that workers had committed to, which had already led to agreements for hundreds of exits. (Most of them have already left in the first semester and the rest will leave in the rest of the year.) In total for this year, the output is likely to reach 1,200 workers.