Job cuts in prospect
Verdi calls on Postbank employees to protest
November 6th, 2023, 5:51 p.m
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According to Deutsche Bank, the majority of its customers hardly ever visit the branches of its subsidiary Postbank. It is therefore planned to close up to 250 branches. This causes unrest among the employees. Now Verdi is calling on them to protest in the affected cities.
The Verdi service union has called for protests against the announced closure of dozens of Postbank branches. In Hamburg, Stuttgart and Munich, the more than 2,000 employees of Postbank Filialvertrieb AG are being asked to demonstrate their dissatisfaction with the planned cuts through protest actions during planned interruptions to company meetings this week.
Deutsche Bank wants to close up to 250 of the current 550 Postbank branches by mid-2026. This was announced by the private customer boss of the Frankfurt DAX group, Claudio de Sanctis, at the end of October. According to evaluations, three quarters of Postbank customers hardly ever visit a branch. There is “no way around” job cuts, the manager recently told the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung”. The bank is negotiating the exact figures with employee representatives. According to Verdi’s estimates, this could result in the loss of several hundred to thousands of jobs.
Demand for job security measures
According to its own statements, Verdi is registering “considerable unrest among the workforce and a complete lack of understanding of the branch closures intended by Deutsche Bank.” The union, together with the general works council of Postbank Filialvertrieb AG, is calling for “job security measures and an early extension of the collective bargaining protection against dismissal”. Redundancies at Postbank for operational reasons are currently excluded until January 31, 2024.
“The announced branch closures are a slap in the face to the employees who have dealt with and absorbed the anger of customers for months and were left alone with inadequate processes due to the IT change,” explained Verdi’s federal specialist group leader for the banking industry, Jan Duscheck. “As a thank you for their commitment, they are now receiving mass branch closures.”
1700 customer complaints
Deutsche Bank is currently struggling with the consequences of moving all customer data from Postbank to its IT systems. Because of the chaos surrounding the migration of data from twelve million Postbank customers to Deutsche Bank’s IT systems, Germany’s industry leader recently hit the headlines.
According to the Federal Association of Consumer Organizations, around 1,700 customers complained between January and September. They were temporarily unable to access their accounts, their accounts were blocked or direct debits were no longer honored. At the same time, customer service was almost impossible to reach. Deutsche Bank has owned Postbank since 2010 and today has around twelve million customers.