Written By:
Tane - Date published:
5:00 am, April 28th, 2009 - 4 comments
Categories: activism, workers' rights -
Tags: banks, finsec, petitions
Does it strike anyone else as odd that at a time when taxpayers are guaranteeing the banking system with public funds, banks have made no such guarantee to their staff about job security?
While the banks made combined profits in excess of $2.5 billion and CEOs recieve salary packages of more than $2 million each, banks continue to cut jobs and offshore work.
The finance workers’ union, Finsec, is currently running a petition for the goverment to make retention of current staffing numbers a condition of the deposits and wholesale funding guarantee schemes.
It’s pretty simple. Profitable financial insitutions receiving taxpayer support should not be adding to the recession by laying off staff.
You can download the petition here. Please print it off and ask your family, friends, work colleagues, sports teams, anyone to sign it. All it takes is a couple of minutes.
Short sighted.
If the banks can’t cut staff (if they need to, to retain an economic profit) then the increased costs will be passed onto the consumer. This will decrease consumer spending in other areas causing efficient businesses to suffer. Why should we all subsidize inefficiency?
$2.5 billion in profits is a lot of saved workers.
Ah, profits are evil right?
There is of course a difference between economic profit and accounting profit (the $2.5 billion you refer to). Economic profit takes into account opportunity cost, which accounting profit does not. Opportunity cost is important because if the opportunity cost is higher in your current profession than another – you will simply move. In this case this would result in banks shutting down and down sizing in the long run.
Thats why in the long run almost all businesses will post an accounting profit. Yet in a competitive industry (like the banking sector) any economic proft will be close to zero.
I would suspect that in the banking sector, being quite competitive, the economic profit would be close to zero.