Bleak Friday

AMP Financial Services will cut around 200 jobs across its business, joining groups including ANZ and the new St George/Westpac entity, which are also expected to announce significant redundancies in the lead up to Christmas.

The management of AMP Financial Services met this morning to discuss the redundancies, and are still finalising the details before communicating the information to staff.

It’s expected AMP managers will be provided with more details on Monday regarding the job cuts, and that news will be communicated internally and/or implemented over the coming two weeks.

The Financial Services Union (FSU) was this morning handing out leaflets outside the group’s head office in Sydney, alerting people to contact them if they are affected.

The FSU has invited AMP employees to a meeting next week to discuss their options and entitlements.

An AMP spokesperson said the group was taking “great care not to compromise the business operations of customer relationships”, and that despite the cost-cutting move, the group’s outlook remains unchanged.

Meanwhile, there's speculation ANZ may be cutting more than 3,000 jobs. FSU representative Leanne Shingles said it had been trying to get the group to “come clean” about the number of job losses to take place for some time, but ANZ had “repeatedly refused to confirm” the number. Various reports place it somewhere between 1,000 and 3,500 jobs (or 10 per cent of the group’s workforce).

The FSU has also been watching the job losses that will result from the St George/Westpac merger, which the group’s chairman, John Curtis, yesterday admitted were “inevitable”. The FSU has estimated job losses as a result of the merger might be in the order of 5,000.

Shingles said news of these job losses just six weeks before Christmas was truly a “bleak day for the industry”.