Branch closures, job cuts, IT chaos – these are restless times for Postbank employees. Now the unions are fighting for better pay.
Protection against dismissal has already been extended – now thousands of Postbank employees are looking for more money. The Verdi union is demanding 15.5 percent in the collective bargaining negotiations that begin on February 6th for around 12,000 employees in the Deutsche Bank Group with a Postbank collective agreement, but at least an increase in salaries by 600 euros.
The German Bank Employees Association (DBV) wants to raise 14.5 percent more money. The employees of Postbank, Postbank branch sales, PCC Services GmbH and BCB AG “finally expected compensation for the inflation losses, which had grown to more than ten percent,” argues the DBV. According to Verdi, the first round of negotiations will take place online on February 26th. and March 18th Further dates have already been agreed.
Exclusion of redundancies for operational reasons until the end of September
Shortly before Christmas, Deutsche Bank promised that it would not lay off employees for operational reasons in its private customer bank in Germany until the end of September 2024. Otherwise, protection against dismissal would have expired at the end of January 2024. However, the unions had put pressure on this issue after Deutsche Bank announced at the end of October that it would close up to 250 of Postbank’s current 550 branches by mid-2026. There is “no way around” job cuts, Deutsche Bank’s head of private customers, Claudio de Sanctis, said.
Postbank has been criticized for problems for months. Complaints from customers had increased, particularly in connection with an IT change in which twelve million Postbank customers were brought together with seven million Deutsche Bank customers in Germany on a common platform. The financial regulator Bafin sent a special supervisor to the institute. Contrary to what was promised, Deutsche Bank did not manage to get all the problems under control by the end of 2023 and is still dealing with them at the beginning of the new year.
Source: Stern
