There is an (increasingly less) unspeakable dream of the managers of large banking groups: to overturn the very nature of the employment relationship, to transform it into something else.
The dream is not explicitly manifested. Yet the clues scattered throughout the various corporate communications, at all levels, are increasingly clear and numerous. So, let’s try to grasp them and put them together to understand where they would like to take us.
First clue
In the meetings held by the various sales managers, the instructions to colleagues are clear: “Your duty is to ensure shareholders a high and stable dividend over time”.
The concept was reiterated in Press release of last May 30, in which the early closure of the 2022-25 industrial plan was announced and in the slides published on 10 June on the website group.bper.it in which, among the objectives that the Group has set itself, there is the “increase relevant of shareholder remuneration”.
All this seems to go against the most basic laws of finance: stock investing is by its nature an investment in risk capital. When things go well, the dividend arrives. When things go less well, the dividend does not arrive. If things go really badly, you can even lose the invested capital. Expecting to transform a stock investment into a guaranteed coupon bond is a completely illogical aspiration: and yet this claim is at the basis of a whole series of behaviors, to which it ends up providing a justification.
Justify the commercial pressuresincreasingly burdensome and invasive, especially towards those who do not do enough to increase dividends.
It justifies aggressive policies aimed at obtaining short-term revenues so as to satisfy the owner shareholder, regardless of the real economy.
Justify the impoverishment of ever larger areas of the territory, abandoned by banks not because they do not produce profits, but because they produce them in percentages that are not adequate to the profit expectations of shareholders. The paradox is that by doing so, impoverishing the territories in which they operate and narrowing their field of action, banks make it increasingly difficult to achieve the same results in the future.
An illogical claim, which seems to want to ignore that the extraordinary results of recent periods have been the result of an unusually favorable trend in rates, destined to end, which will very unlikely be repeated in the future.
Second clue
In the same slides dated 10 July and published on the Bper Group website we read, among the objectives:
“New logics of performance-pay correlation”.
It is normal to expect a strengthening of the MBO, but are we sure that the dream to be realized is limited to this?
Let’s try to imagine a scenario in which not the bonuses, but the remuneration is related, in whole or in part, to the achievement of the assigned objectives. The danger of such an assumption is that many people might be tempted to consider it attractive: “I am good, my wallet produces profits of hundreds of thousands of euros, so why should I earn like the others”?
Reasoning that starts from a serious basic error: the wallet does not belong to the workers, but to the bank. And this means that he can change it at will, for example by transferring a personal contact person. And in a scenario like the one hypothesized, this would mean radically changing her standard of living. It seems like a far-fetched hypothesis, but This is what many workers in the insurance sector have experienced first-hand.
Let’s go back to the Bper area. The day of data publication MBOthe interested people went to check their results with the same spirit with which one reads the lottery results: no one had the absolute certainty of having “won” the prize, because of the convoluted rules but also because the company reserves the right to make and break them at will.
Now imagine the spirit with which we would have gone to read the results if those numbers had not been a matter of the right to an extra sum, but of our basic salary.
We can imagine a parent who comes home and says to his children: “Guys, we’re not going on vacation this year because I only sold 99% of the policies I was supposed to sell.”
Or a person who urgently needs a denture, but has to postpone it until next year because this year he achieved all his goals, but then his most important client passed away, and the heirs live in another city…
We all complain about the high level of anxiety that work causes us; in a situation like the one we are hypothesizing, the current level of stress would be comparable to a yoga class.
Conclusions
Let’s connect the dots, put the clues together, and we won’t have to work hard to imagine the future that bank managers dream of.
A future in which the business risk may be at least partially transferred from capital to labor immediately, not only when the company goes into crisis (in which case unfortunately the transfer of risk occurs promptly).
In which dividends are constant, while salaries drop when things are not going well. And once again, let’s talk about something that in the world insurance It’s been happening for years.
It is essential to understand how important it is to have a national contract that protects us, that guarantees us adequate remuneration for the work done, and not for the results achieved.
It is essential to understand the enormous value of the contract renewal signed at the end of 2023, with cost of living adjustments that benefit EVERYONE indistinctly.
But above all, it is essential to understand that no conquest is eternaland that over time everything can be called into question if we are not attentive and ready to defend what we have.
We have already repelled attacks of this kind in the past: it was 2015 and the attempt was repelled through two strikes with very high participation of workers. And today would we have the same compactness, the same awareness? It is a question we must ask ourselves, because the dream of the shareholders of the big banks is increasingly less hidden.
And we know: “dreams are wishes…”
Fisac Cgil Gruppo Bper
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