“Talks of voluntary departures”. With these four words, union sources summarise the current process at Banco Santander. “No one is talking about layoffs,” they detail. “The numbers don’t support it,” those same sources add. In the first three months of the year, the Cantabrian entity earned 3.56 billion euros, excluding the gain from the sale of its subsidiary in Poland. On the table, the bank’s management has initiated an early retirement plan “without a predetermined figure,” the company clarifies.<\/p>\n
Santander Bank formally began negotiations this week with union representatives to create a common framework for early retirements. The committee was established on Tuesday and is expected to meet again next week to discuss the terms of the agreement. Both the bank and the unions emphasise that there is no specific target for departures or staff reduction, and the process will be voluntary for both parties: employees will not be obliged to accept, and the bank may reject certain applications.<\/p>\n
From the other side of the negotiating table, they agree that “there is no figure yet,” but they do point to an age range. “They are talking about over 55 years,” they tell this newspaper, although it could rise to 57 or 58 years. “It’s not known yet,” counter the bank’s spokespersons. If that age is taken as a boundary, it would be 20% of Santander Spain’s workforce, according to union estimates, which count 4,000 workers above that threshold. But both the bank and employee representatives stress that this does not mean all of them will leave. “We are talking about voluntary departures at all times,” they emphasise. “We will work to ensure they are as few as possible and under the best conditions,” union representatives comment.<\/p>\n
\n“We are talking about voluntary departures at all times,” they convey from the entity\n<\/p>\n
Early retirements are not new to the entity. In fact, they have been occurring in considerable volume and on an individual basis since 2025. For this reason, unions have been demanding for months that common conditions be established for all these departures, and that is what they have begun to negotiate. “We have not made a counterproposal,” unions clarify. There is also no offer from the entity. “We have discussed the possibility of creating a framework to regulate this plan,” the Cantabrian bank details to this newspaper.<\/p>\n
The red line set by the workers’ representatives is in the conditions of the employment regulation file (ERE) carried out by the entity in 2020. “They must be superior; the record profits recorded in recent years must be taken into account,” they affirm. CCOO demands that the agreement consider shorter contribution careers and be “motivating” for those close to early retirement. Among other things, it calls for several tranches from the age of 50, higher percentages on gross salary\u2014or an alternative for cases of high personal voluntary supplements\u2014seniority bonuses for those over 60, contributions until the first retirement age, annual revaluation, maintenance of pension plan contributions, preservation of collective insurance, and guarantees of generational replacement.<\/p>\n
\nSantander closed March with 1,607 branches in Spain, 185 fewer than a year earlier\n<\/p>\n
The CGT union indicated last week that its goal was to close this agreement by mid-July, although the bank does not set a deadline. The entity frames the process in the need to adapt the workforce to the new needs and skills of financial activity, marked by digitalisation, automation, and process simplification.<\/p>\n
This adjustment is already noticeable in the commercial network. Santander closed March with 1,607 branches in Spain, 185 fewer than a year earlier. A decade ago, in March 2016, it had 3,433 branches in the country. According to UGT, the bank has committed to halting branch closures until the end of the year, although this does not prevent some branches from being transferred to an agent.<\/p>\n
At the group level, Santander closed March with 185,000 employees, 11,000 fewer than a year earlier. Asked about this reduction in the conference with analysts following the first-quarter results, CEO H\u00e9ctor Grisi linked it to the transformation the bank is undergoing. “When you simplify and automate processes, you need fewer people than usual. And that’s exactly what’s happening,” he stated. In any case, the entity expects to increase its workforce as a result of the acquisitions of TSB and Webster.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“Talks of voluntary departures”. With these four words, union sources summarise the current process at Banco Santander. “No…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":45451,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[121],"tags":[144,20521,2063,284,12143],"class_list":["post-45450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-banco-santander","tag-banco-santander","tag-challenge","tag-over","tag-santander","tag-unions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45450"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45450\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}