Full report, English - Unite the Union

Executive Summary
This report and the overarching project from which it emerged aims to provide trade unions in the finance
sector with an improved enhanced appreciation of the impact on workers of employer responses to the
crisis and an opportunity to develop a pan-European approach to social dialogue and collective
bargaining. Although gaps still exist in the data collected and its geographical coverage, the research has
identified a number of distinct strategies by employers with the sole objective of creating a more
compliant and flexible workforce and, at the same time, replacing social dialogue and collective
bargaining with the imposition of change through unilateral decision making. The following points
represent the key findings of the research:
Increased labour flexibility
Employees are expected to demonstrate more loyalty, for example by working unpaid overtime, but at
the same time employers have significantly more discretion to broaden the range of tasks their
employees are expected to undertake.
Increase in stress
Finance workers are more frequently under greater pressure to meet targets, the levels of which were
less likely to have been set through joint discussions. This view was shared by a number of
questionnaire respondents, one of which remarked that “there is an even higher pressure [on workers]
to achieve targets” and a “willingness of employers to dismiss for underperformance.”
Intensification of work
In their responses to the questionnaire, and through their participation in the debates at the conference,
trade unions frequently made reference to the changes in work intensity and this was deemed
particularly so since the onset of the crisis. Without doubt, according to union representatives,
employers are today demanding more work from their workforce to be performed within the same
working time.
Reduction in wages, bonuses and other benefits.
As the crisis has evolved employers have sought to reduce costs and, given their relative size as a
proportion of overall business expenditure, labour costs have been the focus of this process. Many
workers have seen their wages fall or, for the more fortunate, frozen and this experience extends beyond
the basic wage packet to other monetary benefits. Throughout the crisis the wages of the sector’s
workforce have risen less than those for workers elsewhere, despite the sector’s healthy profits.
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