Wells Fargo May Have Outsourced Hundreds of Americans’ Jobs This Year

Wells Fargo May Have Outsourced Hundreds of Americans’ Jobs This Year

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GETTY/AFP SPENCER PLATT
23 Dec 2018

2:53

Wells Fargo, the world’s third-largest United States bank, may have outsourced hundreds of Americans’ jobs to foreign countries after laying off U.S. workers this year.

Analysis conducted by the Charlotte Observer‘s Deon Roberts reveals how the multinational bank laid off hundreds of American workers while sending their jobs overseas.

Last year, Breitbart News reported that about 650 American workers with Wells Fargo were laid off from their jobs in Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Washington. At the same time, Americans were being laid off, the multinational bank announced it would hire an additional 7,000 workers in the Philippines to add to its 4,000-strong workforce in the country.Last month, Wells Fargo announced that about 638 Americans would be laid off from their jobs in Florida, California, North Carolina, and Colorado.

The Observer‘s analysis of federal documents reveals that potentially hundreds of those American jobs could have been sent to Wells Fargo’s expanding operations in the Phillippines and India.

In one case from 2011, an American worker with Wells Fargo said in federal documents that her job and potentially 200 U.S. jobs were being sent to India by the bank.

“Wells Fargo … sent large portions of our job duties to India branch of Wells Fargo,” the American worker wrote in the federal complaint. The worker said she trained workers in India for three months in order for the bank to swiftly outsource her and hundreds of U.S. workers’ jobs.

Wells Fargo executives told the Observer that the bank would not certify that more American jobs would not be outsourced to foreign countries in the near future.

The bank announced months ago, as Breitbart News reported, that about 26,500 workers at the multinational bank would be laid off by 2021.

Wells Fargo has consistently imported foreign workers through the H-1B visa program to take high-paying, white-collar U.S. jobs. Between 2015 and 2017, Wells Fargo tried to import nearly 400 foreign workers to take jobs in the U.S.

Cheap, foreign labor is the most prominent driver of multinational corporations outsourcing American workers’ jobs to third-world nations.

For instance, while the average yearly American family’s income is roughly $73,000, the average family’s income in the Phillippines is about $5,200 U.S. dollars, making it a haven for multinational corporations to exploit cheap labor, lay off Americans, and widen executives’ profit margins.

Outsourcing and the offshoring of American jobs to foreign countries is a business model that has been embraced by multinational corporations. Corporations like AT&T, Harley-Davidson, Ralph Lauren, Nike, and IBM have all laid off Americans in order to send their jobs overseas.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2...ans-jobs-year/

Wells Fargo shifts many jobs overseas following layoffs in the US, documents show

BY DEON ROBERTS
DECEMBER 20, 2018 08:42 AM,
UPDATED DECEMBER 20, 2018 12:56 PM

Wells Fargo has laid off hundreds of U.S. employees during the past year as it pushed many of their jobs overseas, according to an Observer analysis of federal documents.


In the Charlotte metro area, the bank’s largest employment hub, mortgage jobs eliminated this year have also been sent overseas, Wells confirmed. The bank slashed hundreds of such workers in the area but would not disclose how many of those jobs it has sent outside the U.S.

The documents, published online by the U.S. Department of Labor, shed light on how Wells Fargo has quietly shifted work out of the country. Many of the U.S. layoffs have affected call center operations, including about 460 employees cut last year when Wells Fargo announced the closure of a site in Pennsylvania.

Wells Fargo has not always disclosed that it was relocating U.S. jobs in announcing the layoffs. But the documents — findings of Labor Department investigations into the cuts — show the bank has sent the work outside of the country.

In the past year, the department investigated 636 layoffs reported by employees and state officials seeking determinations that the workers’ jobs were being shipped out the U.S., documents show. The findings are required before workers can receive federally-funded benefits, like weekly income payments and training so they can find new jobs.

What’s not clear is how many of the 636 jobs Wells sent overseas, although the documents state that a “significant” number were. The Labor Department’s findings also do not name countries where jobs were sent, but Wells Fargo reported expanding its Philippines operations in recent years.

When it announced the Pennsylvania call center closure in October 2017, the bank said that the work done at the facility was not being relocated.

“This decision is being made primarily because we have experienced a drop in call center volume,” Wells spokeswoman Christina Carmichael said at the time. “These jobs are not being moved anywhere.”

But in its findings, the Labor Department said the bank shifted the work to an unnamed foreign country, “which contributed importantly to worker group separations” at the call center. Wells Fargo declined to comment on the Labor Department’s findings, and did not address an Observer question regarding the discrepancy in what happened to the jobs.

“Wells Fargo has been caught lying again,” Erin Mahoney, spokeswoman for New York-based Committee for Better Banks, said in a statement. The coalition of industry employees pushes for better working conditions at banks.

“This time, the bank tried to cover up why it’s laying off frontline employees who live paycheck to paycheck instead of coming clean about shipping their jobs overseas,” Mahoney said.

In response, Wells stated, “This is a structure that is common in the industry and we have long been transparent about it. We strongly disagree and take issue with any claims that say otherwise. We value our international team members as an integral part of our workforce, yet the vast majority of Wells Fargo team members will continue to be based in the U.S.”

Cutting costs

The overseas moves come as the San Francisco-based bank seeks to trim billions in costs and recover from a string of scandals in recent years.

Wells Fargo has previously acknowledged that moving jobs overseas could be part of its efforts to centralize operations following a 2016 scandal involving fake accounts opened by bankers seeking to meet high-pressure sales goals, the Observer reported last year.

“It’s shameful that an American company like Wells Fargo is slashing jobs at home and outsourcing them abroad, all while planning to spend more than $24 billion on stock buybacks that benefit only the bank’s executives and shareholders,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, said in a statement to the Observer. Warren is a long-time Wells critic and member of the Senate Banking Committee.

Wells stated in June that it planned to repurchase billions in its stock through the second half of next year.
In a statement to the Observer, the bank did not rule out sending more work outside the U.S. It also is aiming to cut its total employment by 5 to 10 percent over the next three years under a plan announced in September.


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Wells Fargo has laid off hundreds of U.S. employees during the past year as the bank has pushed jobs overseas, according to an Observer analysis of Department of Labor Trade Adjustment Assistance documents.
Patrick T. Fallon Bloomberg

The bank continues looking for ways to streamline operations, it said in the statement to the paper. Those efforts include moving work to other U.S. locations and, in some cases, out of the country to reflect its need to operate in a 24-hour business cycle, it said.
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