One of Britain's biggest banks has shrugged off reports of consumer resistance to relocating jobs in India and says its aim is to reshape its business to make it more competitive in a global environment.
Last month market researchers in the United Kingdom noted some consumer objections to the relocation of call centres to India, where problems with diction are making it difficult for Indian operators to be clearly understood back in the UK.
Barclays Bank says it will not do anything to the detriment of customer service, but a spokeswoman for the bank also confirmed that more UK-based jobs are likely to be relocated in India in the foreseeable future.
She told rediff.com that there are currently 500 back office jobs in India involving data in-putting, but they did not involve any day-to-day contact with British customers.
"There is a presumption that more jobs will shift overseas and India is a likely destination, but as to the numbers involved we're not at the stage of revealing them," she said.
Her comments follow an agreement with finance union UNIFI to avoid compulsory job redundancies in the UK if jobs are moved abroad to India and other locations.
UNIFI estimates 40,000 jobs in the UK banking sector are likely to be shipped abroad in the short term with tens of thousands more involved in the years to come.
As far as Barclays is concerned UNIFI national secretary Keith Brookes has estimated that some 6,000 jobs could shift overseas to India.
"Its a very unfortunate trend, but in the real world that's the way of the market," he says.
The union has praised the ground-breaking agreement with Barclays, describing it as 'humane.' It will put pressure on other UK high street banks to set up similar deals.
The Barclays agreement involves the setting up of a voluntary register so that redundant staff who want to stay on with the bank can switch to a vacant post that someone else has chosen to leave.
A retraining package is also part of the redundancy agreement.
Bank staff who are scheduled to lose their jobs due to outsourcing will get three months additional notice on top of the existing agreement for three months paid leave when they are made redundant.
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