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Royal Bank of Scotland embarrassed by pay email
ECONOMY SETTING FINANCIAL ORGANISATION The Royal Bank of Scotland has been embarrassed by an email slip that reveals how much it pays some of its contracted workers.
Sympathy for bankers of the world is very low, so when RBS contractor Hays let slip an email that revealed that it pays around £2,000 a day for contractors no one was very amused. This is after all an organisation that is supposed to look after money and not throw it around with abandon, and one that has shed full time employees' jobs by the busload.
Both Hays and RBS are contrite about the incident, and both have apologised. "Hays recognises that the correct treatment of data is of the utmost importance and we are taking the unauthorised release of this data extremely seriously," said the supplier to the Financial Times, as it reacted to its unfortunate leakage.
The FT reports that the Royal Bank of Scotland is reconsidering its arrangement with the firm, though apparently not its ongoing decision to pay some of its 3,000 contract workers as much as £2,000 a day.
"We are extremely disappointed that confidential personnel data has been shared by one of our suppliers," RBS told the FT. "This is unacceptable and we are taking action to address this issue. No customer information has been compromised."
The Financial Times also reminds us, should we have needed it, that RBS is 83 per cent owned by UK taxpayers since it got itself into all sorts of financial troubles last year.
Unite the Union, which represents workers, said that it was already concerned about RBS and its sackings, and was even more worried after hearing this news.
"It is wholly inappropriate that RBS, backed by taxpayers, appears to be throwing money at thousands of contractors. Unite the union has serious concerns about the widespread use of highly paid staff on short term contracts at a time when RBS continues to cut large numbers of staff," said David Fleming, Unite national officer in a statement.
"We have expressed to the bank our unhappiness that thousands of permanent staff are being sacked when contractor staff continue to work in other areas of the bank. The use of such contract staff is about short term fixes and not long term investment in the workforce. Unite continues to challenge RBS on these issues." µ
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I'd like to see a bit more detail here. Is this what the contracting agency was billing the bank for, or what the agency was paying its contractors? I worked as a contract worker for our local government, and was given the opportunity once to see a bill that the government was paying for contractors. The agency was billing the IT department $125/hour. This was ten years ago.
I don't know what the agency was paying its people, but they were fairly unskilled, with poor English skills. I suspect they were here on a visa, and probably making around $25 - $30 an hour, what the going rate for contract workers was in those days.
There is a reason why so many workers are being laid off and replaced by contractors - the agencies are skimming humungous profits, and because these are proprietary contracts, they are not auditable by the public.
If you look at who these agencies are, they are owned by the same scammers that are ripping us off everywhere else.
I said that to reach that level of pay you need technical skills that are rare and hard to acquire. You also lose all of the perks and protections of a permanent member of staff (many people aren't prepared to take that risk) and may not work for large parts of a year. Even if you DO work the whole year then the agent gets his cut off of the top and you need to factor in other items like pension and medical insurance before you can compare against permanent rates.
Your £2000 day rate is probably equivalent to a permanent member of staff on £250-300,000/year. That's pretty respectable but not unheard of, and only paid to a small number of contractors with key skills.
Are you trying to make us feel pity for people who are raking in somewhere in the neighborhood of £500,000 a year? Ohhh boo hoo! No pension?! How will they ever find any money to set aside?! How will they ever pay for their... I don't know... medical bills in the UK? Sorry. I don't feel bad for them at all. If they were hired on, they'd probably get paid far less. I'm sure they're not upset about it at all.
Bankers are nothing legalized thieves.They are licensed to steal from the taxpayer and when they can't steal enough they resort to asking for handouts from their victims,it's time that government severely restricted what banks can charge and how much execs can earn!
This outrageous so called pay is criminal. Just like our government, judges, cops and lawyers are a organized criminal entity. They all work together in their own circle and if you are not in the circle of power then you are a surf.
banks are organised criminals and government ministers are on their payrolls so they continue to get away with it scott free
that these union guys start ranting on without finding what they'd need to do to get £2000 per day (less the agent's cut).
Start with a good degree, work for 10+ years in an obscure technical field that you have no idea may be useful and at the end of that, if you're lucky, you'll get to interview for a position that may pay £2000/day, but doesn't include sick pay, holiday pay, maternity/paternity leave or a pension. It also gives no guarantees of length of service beyond 3 or 6 months, with a month's notice so it could be much less than that. You may spend significant parts of a year between jobs.
Your union man would run a mile from that.
You'll also note that this was the MOST that they were paying, I'd be highly surprised if more than a couple were on this rate, with the majority down below 1/3rd of that.
Surely the government should step in on this one, there is no possible justification for spending £6,000,000 a day on contractors, that would keep 150 staff employed for a year at £40,000 each!
I'm a contractor too, earning a fifth of what RBS pay, and that is more than enough, without being greedy!