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On 10 June, CBA notified the FSU of 304 redundancies across its technology and retail banking departments.
The union has commenced legal action against the major bank with the Fair Work Commission after it claimed 110 of the job titles that were affected by these redundancies were being advertised at CBA India, its Bangalore-based subsidiary.
This allegedly includes positions such as engineering manager, software engineer, senior software engineer, senior data engineer, staff data engineer, and staff software engineer.
FSU said these actions breach the major bank’s EA, under clause 36:
Your position will be redundant if the work being done by you (or a substantial portion of it) is:
a. No longer required by us to be done by anyone.
b. Required to be done at a different location, which is not within a reasonable commuting distance.
c. Restructured so that some or all of the duties of the position are split up between one or more other positions.
FSU national secretary Julie Angrisano said these allegations are “the very definition of bad faith” and are “a shameful act from Australia’s richest company.”
“We have known for years that big banks have had a preference for work to be performed offshore. Yet we now have the proof that this is happening in real time. Our members are outraged by this kind of behaviour and seriously question CBA’s commitment to Australian jobs,” she said.
Angrisano said the FSU doesn’t believe the redundancies are genuine as the roles advertised “are not required to be done in India.”
“They’re just moving the work there to take advantage of cheaper labour and further line their own pockets,” she added.
The FSU said that in CBA India’s annual report, the employee numbers at the subsidiary had almost doubled, climbing from 2,854 to 5,630 in two years from 2022–24.
In that same period, the FSU alleges the CBA Australia employee count has dropped by 4 per cent, from 38,153 down to 35,572.
“All Australians are paying for the sham redundancy actions of the CBA. Not only are Australian workers being unfairly and reasonably sacked but this is being subsidised by all taxpayers,” Angrisano said.
“Bona fide redundancies are taxed concessionally in the hands of the workers. It is especially disgusting that the nation’s richest company is also reducing the tax take as it makes the final payment to hundreds of Australians that we know are being sacked solely to have their work performed offshore.”
This latest controversy comes not long after the FSU came after the major for cutting nearly 800 jobs in the past 12 months, within days of posting a $2.6 billion profit in the March quarter.
[Related: CBA job cuts climb to nearly 800 in past 12 months amid ‘swollen’ profits]
