‘Banker’s Hours’ Means Time Spent Job Hunting
Lona Jupiter had spent almost two years telling the public why her bank was eliminating 5,000 jobs, but she was still surprised when she was laid off last February.
“I was surprised, but there had been precedents and I could understand it,” said Jupiter, who had spent 17 years with Wells Fargo Bank and risen to senior vice president and head of communications. “It’s not as traumatic as it would have been five years ago, when banks never let people go.
“There’s a big alumni association of ex-bankers out there.”
In the last five years, nearly 30,000 jobs have been eliminated at California banks--almost 15% of the total. The trend, which is being repeated across the country, is largely a product of deregulation and the increased competition it has spawned.
Some of the layoffs in California have been large and dramatic. San Francisco-based Wells Fargo has cut 5,000 jobs since its merger with Crocker National Bank in May of 1986. Bank of America and its parent corporation, also headquartered in San Francisco, have trimmed 20,100 positions around the world since 1986.
First Interstate, based in Los Angeles, is reducing its work force by 1,000. And on Wednesday, Security Pacific, also of Los Angeles, said it was closing 40 to 60 branches, which will affect an undetermined number of employees.
Other cutbacks have been smaller. Los Angeles’ Union Bank laid off 110 people earlier this year, and many smaller banks around the state have closed branches or reduced staff.
Not all the cutbacks result in people looking for work. Some employees fill other spots in the bank; some go with businesses that are sold to a new owner.
But the number of out-of-work bankers has risen dramatically in California in the last few years. And, unlike aerospace or construction, it has been jarring for a business where people thought they had signed on for life.
“Banking was a secure industry where you hired in, worked 30 years, got a gold watch and retired,” said Robert D. Oberlander, a management consultant in San Marino for RMA Consulting, which has helped find new jobs for employees from many banks. “There is a trauma.”
Thomas P. Christy saw his trauma coming and was braced for it.
Christy figured he had a secure job at Union Bank, where he was an assistant vice president in the personnel office at the Los Angeles headquarters. But he began to sense that might not be true after last October’s stock market crash and a couple of quarters of thin earnings at the bank. On top of that, Union’s owner, Britain’s Standard Chartered, had put the company up for sale.
Not All Are Pragmatists
“I’m a realist, and when I recognized that the inevitable was coming, I began quietly looking at other prospects,” Christy said in an interview Thursday.
In February, his boss called him in, and Christy learned that his suspicions had been well founded. On March 3, he was laid off. On March 14, he was in a new job as vice president and human resources chief for Topa Thrift & Loan, a small commercial lender in Beverly Hills.
“Banks have to take a serious look at their management structure,” Christy said. “During the 1960s and ‘70s they were fat. Now they look at certain functions and recognize there are luxuries that they can do without.”
Not all laid off employees are so pragmatic, and not all find other jobs so easily.
A data-processing expert for Bank of America in San Francisco has been looking for work for several weeks and his bitterness has increased with time.
“I’m beginning to feel like I’m blacklisted or something,” said the former B of A worker, who asked that his name not be used. “I know it can’t be me.”
If the alumni association that Lona Jupiter referred to is a comfort to some, it can be a bane to others. Professional recruiters and firms hired to help place laid-off bank employees said the competition is stiffer than ever today because of the reductions under way at many banks.
And many bankers are so angry or confused, or both, about the loss of what they expected to be a lifetime job that they want nothing more to do with the industry.
“In a number of cases, these people have been long-term bank employees and they say they are looking for positions outside of banking in a more secure business,” said Oberlander, the management consultant. But he said many industries now define job security in terms of only three to five years.
Crocker Sale Triggered Layoffs
The biggest cutbacks have come from Bank of America, which is recovering from three consecutive years of record losses. But not all of the bank’s 20,100 job cuts have put people on the street. Many involved the sale of assets, such as the Charles Schwab discount brokerage operation, and the jobs transferred to the new owners.
The greatest single rush to the unemployment line in recent California banking history came in May of 1986, when 1,600 of Crocker National Bank’s 11,000 employees were suddenly out of work as a result of its acquisition by Wells Fargo. Since what was then the largest merger in American banking history, Wells has trimmed another 3,400 positions, some by layoffs and some by attrition and transfers.
David L. Sanson was head of corporate communications at Crocker and one of the initial 1,600, which included the bank’s entire management team.
“You don’t need two managements when you have only got one bank,” said Sanson, who spent the next year looking for a suitable new job. Last June, he went to work as vice president for corporate affairs at Seafirst Bank in Seattle, the largest bank in Washington.
Wells Fargo, which had been closing branches and laying off workers since 1983, set up a series of centers across the state to help employees come to terms with losing their old jobs and find new ones.
“The lore is that if you are going to get laid off, we have done it for so long that we do it very well,” said a Wells Fargo executive.
Other banks in California are also gaining that same experience.
