With Australian unemployment surging, the Finance Sector Union (FSU) is furious over revelations the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) is hiring over 100 Indian software engineers to replace hundreds of Australian workers it fired just months ago.
The bank’s CBA India subsidiary is currently recruiting technical staff, the FSU noted, including Staff Data Engineer, Senior Software Engineer, Software Engineer, Staff Software Engineer, Engineering Manager, Software Engineer, and Senior Data Engineer.
Some 110 of these are identical to jobs CBA cut this year – including 304 in June, 163 in May, and 164 in March – in what the FSU called an “outrageous and unjustified” move it said CBA made in “piecemeal announcements [so it] wouldn’t be widely noticed.”
The CBA Enterprise Agreement’s definition of ‘redundancy’, it says, encompasses roles “no longer required by [CBA] to be done by anyone, required to be done at a different location which is not within a reasonable commuting difference, [or] restructured.”
“For them to make workers redundant in Australia is to make a claim that those positions are no longer required,” FSU national secretary Julia Angrisano said, adding that to then hire Indian staff for the same roles “is the very definition of bad faith.”
“By hiring for the same job, at their own Indian subsidiary, they’re showing themselves to have breached the Enterprise Agreement and essentially lied to their workers,” she said, noting that FSU will take CBA to the Fair Work Commission over the issue.
Relocating tech roles to India
CBA has long hinted at needing to look overseas for skills, with former human resources group executive Sian Lewis telling the 2021 Gartner IT Symposium that “there simply isn’t enough tech talent in Australia to meet demand across all organisations.”
That was two years before CBA slashed 251 Australian IT, business banking and retail banking roles – and five years after the bank exited the Indian market after failing to build a profitable presence there.
Now – on the back of a surge in Australian-Indian relations that includes a push to more readily recognise and share skilled ICT staff – CBA is again rebuilding its Indian headcount, nearly doubling staff in the country from 2,854 in 2022 to 5,630 last year.
During the same time, FSU noted, CBA Australia has laid off 2,581 local workers – leading Angrisano to label the newly discovered deception “a shameful act from Australia’s richest company.”
CBA India is hiring for dozens of roles that it declared redundant in Australia just weeks ago. Image: Supplied
An Information Age search of the CBA India Jobs site showed 140 roles are currently being advertised – with roles including those mentioned by FSU – and that jobs were continuing to be posted even after FSU announced its findings.
Other tech roles on offer include Staff Software Engineer – Gen AI, a Senior Finance Analyst in the CBA’s Technology Finance Center of Excellence (CoE), Senior Manager of the Fraud & Scams CoE, Cyber Defence Analyst, Cyber Incident Responder, and more.
One Software Engineer role at the Bangalore-Manyata Tech Park promises a “key role in delivering key capabilities like building the APIs to integrate CBA systems…. [and] regular opportunities to work on some of the finest IT systems in Australia.”
“We have known for years that big banks have had a preference for work to be performed offshore,” Angrisano said, adding that “outraged” FSU members “now have the proof that this is happening in real time.”
Restructuring at the worst time
CBA isn’t the only bank restructuring its tech workforce, with Westpac cutting local jobs and NAB also adding thousands of Indian jobs in recent years as it shifts away from long-established offshoring arrangements and pivots to bolster its capabilities in AI.
Yet the banks' pushback against the FSU – CBA said “there is no basis” to the union’s allegations and that it had been “transparent in communicating workforce shifts with our technology team” – will ring hollow for hundreds of Australian workers let go in a time of surging local unemployment.
Newly released ABS figures showed that Australian unemployment grew from 4.1 per cent in May to 4.3 per cent in June, with youth employment surging but full-time employment dropping by 38,000 overall as underemployment and part-time work grew.
With AI variously blamed and exonerated for jobs, and many companies rehiring staff after going all-in on AI too quickly, CBA’s duplicity amplifies the uncertainty of a tough economic climate and an IT market that recently shrank for the first time in 17 years.
CBA has been unrepentant about hiring in India, with CEO Matt Comyn telling the company’s last AGM that “in some areas there is just not sufficient capability in Australia.”
“We are a better bank because we’ve been able to hire more skilled [financial crime tool] expertise… in India,” he said while lauding its university partnerships as “extremely important” in building “specialist capabilities” in security, AI and data science.
That was just weeks after CBA announced a five-year strategic AI partnership with the University of Adelaide, and two years after a similar deal with Griffith University as the bank worked to increase its domestic roster of financial crime specialists.
“We see this as an opportunity [and] as a market locally where there are some specific skills that will be developed,” Comyn said – just months before slashing local jobs – “and it’s been an opportunity for us to bring in some new talent in those areas to CBA.”
“To continue to attract, retain and develop outstanding people,” he added, “we must provide interesting and challenging roles and contemporary training to support their development, as well as competitive remuneration.”
The FSU isn’t buying it: “We do not believe [these]… are in fact genuine redundancies,” Angrisano said.
“These jobs are not required to be done in India; they’re just moving the work there to take advantage of cheaper labour and further line their own pockets.”
