Lloyds To 'Offshore' 2,000 Jobs In IBM Data Center Outsourcing Deal (thestack.com)

In early January, IBM announced a roughly $1.6 billion outsourcing deal with Lloyds Banking Group. IBM would pay Lloyds for its data center assets and in return will charge the bank for ongoing management. Today, Lloyds plans to move almost 2,000 members of staff to U.S. tech giant IBM as part of the IT outsourcing deal. An anonymous Slashdot reader shares a report from The Stack: The seven-year deal hopes to save the bank close to $930 million in costs, streamline the business and make its IT services more agile. Lloyds Trade Union (LTU), which represents around 35,000 members of staff, now "derecognized" by the bank, claimed in a newsletter that once the deal is signed the jobs would be "offshored" over a four-year period. It added that most of the 1,961 positions would be cut. "1,961 staff will be transferred to IBM including permanent staff, contractors, 3rd parties and offshore suppliers. However after 4 years, only 193 of the staff transferred to IBM will still be working on the LBG contract," wrote LTU.

Comments

Don't these guys ever learn?

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd think by now everyone would know better than to outsource to IBM. JPMorgan outsourced to IBM and then brought back support in-house not once, not twice but **THREE** times before they learned their lesson. I guess whomever got the kickback for those outsourcing deals is now working at Lloyds.

Besides, IBM is notorious for coming in cheap and then making back their money by nickel and dime'n you later once you request for things not in the original contract, all the while you suffer with poor service.

Re:End result of unionization

[bobbied]

Many believe that Unions have out lived their usefulness. We have labor laws, health and safety laws for the work place and the minimum wage, all things that Unions initially had to fight for, but now the government enforces these things at the federal and state level.

Personally, Unions have never done me any good, but my profession is not usually unionized anyway. That being said, I think they are of marginal utility and I'm not sure the good they manage is worth the political baggage they bring to the work place. In my view Unions have become obsessed with political power and have left their primary purpose of representing labor and negotiating for worker's interests with management. They have forsaken their original role and have parlayed their money from dues and influence on the membership's voting habits into political power.

I'm not advocating that unions be done away with, but I generally do not support them and would not want to work under one. Unfortunately for Unions, this is becoming the majority opinion and they have failed most of their efforts to unionize non-union shops over the last decade. So, it seems that they will be dying out to me.