Barclays and the sack race…

Last year Barclays bank made a large profit and celebrated by sacking thousands of staff (see Barclays and the sack race).

This year Barclays made even more profit – and so to celebrate will sack even more staff. Barclays adjusted pre-tax profits were £5.2 billion for 2013, that’s £165 every second in profit. In a month that’s £430 million.

The sack race

Barclays also announced that it will be sacking up to 12,000 people (including 7,000 in the UK). So assuming every employee to be sacked is on the average UK full-time wage of £26,500, Barclays could afford to keep every single one of them on for a year (including NI and pension contributions) from less than one month’s profits.
As we said last year, no company should be able to make redundancies as long as it was  profitable. After all, why should a company making profits be allowed to sack the workforce that produced those profits – simply to try to make  higher profits for shareholders and to give ever larger bonuses to casino bankers?

But take a look at where the money is going. Before profits are calculated, Barclays will £2.38 billion in bonuses to its investment bankers – the socially useless parasites of late capitalism – a 10% increase on last year.
Instead of paying those bonuses (on top of above average wages) that £2.38 billion could pay for a golden goodbye of £200,000 to each of the 12,000 staff being sacked.

But it won’t. Barclays’ the epitome of a nihilistic cannibal capitalism, that strips jobs, pay and dignity away from the many to give riches to the few. This is the gratuitous redistribution of wealth from poor to rich.

It also means customers will get worse service – those sacked staff will translate into few cashiers, fewer staff in call centres and possibly the closing of some high street branches.

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