About 200 members of the National Union of Banking Employees (NUBE) gathered outside the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Ltd (HSBC) headquarters in Leboh Ampang to protest against the failure of the management to honour its agreement.
Nube secretary-general J. Solomon said the employees deserved what they were promised and it was an injustice to deny or cut the perks they were entitled to under a collective agreement signed between the bank and the union. Instead, HSBC had opted to “shortchange” and intimidate employees so that they would resign without compensation.
He said, although it was a longstanding problem, the situation had worsened with the appointment of a new chief executive officer in April. Since then, he said, there had been a further tightening on employee benefits.
He added that union members were disappointed that an international bank like HSBC was treating its employees so shabbily. ”We are not asking for something that is not in the agreement. We are just asking them to honour the collective agreement. We have proposed dialogues, but even that has been shot down.”
The old collective agreement had lapsed for more than a year, but HSBC has yet to meet union officials to discuss its renewal.
“The union also found out that the company, under the name of restructuring exercise, had outsourced employees’ duties to an outside firm without any consultation with the union,” Solomon said, adding that the re-delegation of duties of that sort was against the agreement that they had agreed on.
