Sovereign Bancorp has cut its Pennsylvania staff to 2,710, from 3,227 at the beginning of the year, confirmed spokesman Andrew Gully, a spokesman for the bank.
Cuts aren't just at the Boston bank's former Wyomissing and Philadelphia headquarters. It's "across the business lines," says Gully, spokesman for Sovereign, which is owned by Spain's Banco Santander. Nationally, Sovereign has slipped from 12,000 to just under 10,000 workers in eight states.
So 517 jobs gone in PA, some of them after the January 30 deal between the bank and dissident shareholder-employees. That deal says "Santander will not terminate and will not to permit Sovereign to terminate, except, in either case, for cause, the employment of any Sovereign employees employed by Sovereign in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania" until next year.
"People can take voluntary departures," Gully pointed out. "We'd like to reduce jobs. They get an enhanced severance package if they left."
How enhanced? Workers whose layoffs were announced before the settlement get severance pay based on time served. Others got "a year's worth of salary," plus severance, Donovan & Searles LLP partner Michael Donovan, who represented shareholders and employees vs. Sovereign, told me. Workers could stay a year, then leave. Or they could leave now, get a year's pay for staying home, and have that time to find another job, earning two incomes. Tough choice! Donovan says Sovereign's cuts conform with "both the spirit, and the letter," of the deal.
Sovereign, once the biggest bank based in eastern Pennsylvania, was bought by Santander for pennies on the dollar after rebel investors forced out longtime chief executive Jay S. Sidhu and ran the giant savings bank into the ditch. Sidhu now runs New Century Bank of Phoenixville, where he's in expansion mode, raising capital and hiring Sovereign veterans.
Sovereign is "finished" cutting, Sovereign's Gully told me. "Pennsylvania is still an important market for us. We'll be hiring."
Source: Philly
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