For thousands of Swiss bank employees, this is the information they would have gladly done without, a few days before the start of the summer holidays. According to the Bloomberg agency, the new banking giant UBS, which took over its rival Credit Suisse (CS) in near bankruptcy, is preparing to cut 35,000 jobs out of the 120,000 that the group has had worldwide since the finalization of the redemption, Monday, June 12.
Half of the 45,000 CS employees “absorbed” into the new entity should lose their jobs, including almost 12,000 at its various sites in Zurich, the Swiss financial center, which has never recorded such a drain in its entire history. Wall Street and the City will also be hard hit, since there are the main teams of the investment banking activity which caused the fall of the house Credit Suisse.
“These are horrifying numbers, writes the Zurich specialist letter Inside Paradeplatz. UBS completely dismantles Credit Suisse. » Office workers busy with administrative tasks pay the heaviest price. Roger Nordmann is not indifferent to their fate. The socialist deputy from Vaud is part of the parliamentary commission of inquiry responsible for studying the responsibilities in the Credit Suisse debacle. He says he is disgusted by the treatment reserved for the trimmers of the flagship of Swiss finance: “We lay off en masse those who can’t do anything about it, the back office employees. At the same time, those responsible for the descent into hell can continue to wallow in the huge bonuses they will keep despite the proven damage they have caused. »
A step-by-step operation
At the end of the operation, only a quarter of the 16,000 people from Credit Suisse who were employees on Swiss territory should succeed in saving their place in the new banking group. Clearly, it is a pure and simple eradication of the culture of Credit Suisse that is in the process of carrying out the general management of UBS, under the leadership of its managing director, Sergio Ermotti. The job will be “the most difficult steering wheel” integration, he said at the Swiss Economic Forum in Interlaken (Centre) three weeks ago, without further details.
UBS refused, Wednesday, June 28, to confirm information from Bloomberg, according to which the operation will be done in stages. During the summer, and without notice, because the social measures in force in the United States and the United Kingdom allow it, it is the places of New York and London which should see the first layoffs.
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