“Eviction of Employees in the Consolidated Banks Has Been Started.”

According to the financial circle, the merging banks including the Kookmin Bank and the Woori Bank are going to sort out the employees who had poor performances and re-educate or let them to retire under the early retirement scheme.

They are called as the ‘employees of riding without payment’ and mainly consisted of the targeted employees lowering the productivity due to the underperformance of their tasks and worsening the atmosphere of working place by frequent complaints. These employees still remain by utilizing the opportunity of the organization having been enlarged and being loosely controlled due to the merger although they are mostly deficient in the efficiency of their works due to their failures in adapting to a rapidly changing financial environment.

The Kookmin Bank and the Woori Bank took out their first swords aiming at the ‘employees of riding without payment’ lowering the efficiency of management when they started to put their organization in good orders. The Woori Bank is considering the suitable scale of the plan, according to which it will re-educate or educate for the outplacement the employees constituting about 3% (300 employees) of the record of management performance last year from the bottom.

Although the Woori Bank has a plan to lay off about 5% of employees from the bottom every year, it decided to decrease the scale in consideration of good performance last year.

The high ranking officer of the Woori Bank said, “In case of an employee with an annual salary of 50 million Korean won the cost borne by the bank exceeds 100 million Korean won” and added, “The bank can not enhance the profitability by continuing to embrace them.”

Mr. Jack Welch, former Chairman of General Electric in the United States, has enhanced the productivity and competitiveness of employees by taking a decisive action of the implementation of employment policy by which the low 10% from the bottom was laid off every year.

The Kookmin Bank has a plan to sort out the General Managers of the branches who continued to be given the poorest records this year in the management evaluation in addition to that last year.

The high ranking officer of the Kookmin Bank said, “The bank is reviewing whether to give the General Managers of branches, who recorded the poor performance, chances or whether to let them wait for further action.” and added, “There are schemes of forcing them to work with promoted juniors after demoting them and to play sales roles independently based on 100% his performance like a insurance planner.”

Do-Young Kim nirvana1@donga.com