Source:www.news.ninemsn.com.au

Air New Zealand has again backed away from outsourcing plans, telling finance workers their jobs won’t be moved to India or Fiji.

Air New Zealand had previously announced about 70 finance workers would face the chop, expecting to save about $NZ2 million ($A1.8 million) by sending the jobs overseas.

The company originally hoped to move the jobs to Fiji but after the military coup in the country chose India as an alternative.

“We have now formed a view that India would not meet our requirements, so the outsourcing proposal has been withdrawn and this was communicated to staff earlier this week,” a statement from the airline said.

The backdown comes after the airline earlier this month announced it would not go ahead with plans to outsource the jobs of about 1,700 check-in staff and loading staff to save up to $NZ20 million ($A17.9 million).

That move was abandoned after a deal with unions allowed them to save costs by changing work conditions.

Jill Ovens from the Service and Food Workers Union (SFWU) said the latest move was good news for many of the finance staff.

She said the decision not to push ahead with the outsourcing came because of difficulties in contracting work to other countries, and because of pressure on the airline from the government.

Air New Zealand is 80.4 per cent owned by the New Zealand government.

“I don’t think there is any outsourcing on the table now. Cargo was the other possibility everybody has been talking about, but I don’t think they will do it while we have a Labour government.

“I think it will be a different story next year if National gets in because I think they will sell the shares,” Ovens said.

But Ovens said it was not all good news for the airline’s finance staff, with many already making plans to spend redundancy money they will now miss out on.

“On the basis of getting this redundancy some people had made quite drastic plans for their lives,” she said.

Air New Zealand recently announced a half-year profit of $NZ74 million ($A66.4 million), a 61 per cent jump from a year earlier.

Source: www.indiaabroad.com

Even as the buy out of Dutch ABN Amro by Barclays hit the news stands, British banking giant Barclays’ plans to shift thousands of jobs to India, is just the latest in a series of such decisions by European and American banks, which are expected to hire more than 50,000 professionals in the country, over the next three years.

Taking account of the combined headcount of ABN Amro and UK’s Barclays Plc, it is more than set to expand by over 10,000-employees on the sub-continent following the latter’s $91-billion takeover of the Dutch banking major.

Together with Barclays and ABN Amro, a half a dozen foreign banks, such as, Citigroup, HSBC and Standard Chartered are possibly in line to hire over 50,000-employees in India, across various operations, including back-end jobs that will be moved from high-cost developed countries to low cost ones.

In a bid to expand their presence in the world’s second-fastest growing major economy and benefit from low-cost opportunities in IT enabled back-end operations, foreign banks are going increasingly bullish on their headcount expansion plans in India, according to an industry observer.

During their $91-billion cash and stock merger deal announcement, Barclays and ABN Amro declared they would be moving 10,800 jobs to low-cost locations like India. The deal also means that there will be net reduction of 12,800 jobs from their combined workforce of 2, 17,000 employees.

As a result, sources close to the two firms affirm, this combined entity has the potential to create 8,000-10,000 jobs in India, which includes jobs that will be off-shored from other locations, including previous hiring plans separately announced by Barclays and ABN Amro.

With 2,000 people on its payrolls in India, ABN only last month declared its plans to double this number in a year’s time, while Barclays with close to 1,000 employees in India, said it would be moving over 200-jobs to India after the closure of one of its call centres. Besides, Citigroup, the world’s largest financial services firm, which recently announced a massive reduction of over 17,000 jobs worldwide, is planning to move thousands of jobs to low-cost locations like India. The Indian payrolls of the US bank, which already employs over 22,000-people in the country, is likely to increase by 5,000-8,000 employees following this restructuring.

As well, HSBC, another British banking giant is also planning to increase its headcount in India by taking on an additional 8,000-employees that will take its employee strength to 30,000 by next year. Standard Chartered, another UK-based bank also has major plans to double it’s over 5,000-strong India headcount, within the next three years.

Besides, a number of European banks, such as, Allianz Group’s Dresdner Bank and the Royal Bank of Scotland, the latter one of the suitors for ABN Amro, are also trying to expand their presence in India. Their entry means thousands of new jobs would be created in the sub-continent.

And, apart from the usual B-School graduates, even engineers from institutions like IIT and through out the country are being pursued with offers for a job in a bank. Investment banking, according to a recent survey conducted by A.C. Nielsen and ORG-Marg, has been named amongst the top five industries that students from the country’s premier engineering colleges prefer, while, investment banking giants like Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers have been placed amongst the Top 10 most coveted employers.