By Alison@Creekside
Royal Bank of Canada Chief Human Resources Officer Zabeen Hirji explains above that technically it’s not RBC that has hired temporary foreign workers to replace RBC employees. No, rather it’s that RBC has hired Indian offshore outsourcing company iGATE to do their own hiring as part of RBC’s plan to transition RBC IT jobs overseas to India.
What about government reaction that this is unacceptable?
Oh, says Hirji, we were already in conversation with relevant government departments last week and besides everybody is outsourcing overseas now.
Indeed.
At left we see iGATE receiving RBC’s Outsourcing Excellence Award back in 2008, just months before RBC itself received a $25 billion dollar government bailout, or ‘backstop’ as we prefer to call taxpayer bailouts of corps in Canada, amounting to 63% of the bank’s total value. RBC CEO Gordon Nixon took home $10M+ in salary and compensation that same year.
At the time, RBC VP and head of Application Services Marjorie Mong explained :
“The key message to [RBC IT staff] was that offshoring was not about job cuts. It was about augmenting our workforce in a flexible way.”
… consulting firms use temporary work visas to help American companies cut costs. He says they use the visas to supply cheaper workers here, but also to smooth the transfer of American jobs to information-technology centers overseas.
“What these firms have done is exploit the loopholes in the H-1B [foreign temporary tech workers] program to bring in on-site workers to learn the jobs [of] the Americans to then ship it back offshore.”As RBC’s Hirji explained above, it was necessary to bring the offshore workers on-site to RBC in order to learn RBC procedures first hand.The two companies have been working closely since 2005. There is an “RBC Offshore Development Centre” in the iGATE facility in Bangalore.
RBC spokesperson Rina Cortese told Go Public several foreign workers from iGATE will be working in the bank’s Toronto offices until 2015. By then, she said, most of the work will be transferred abroad, but a few of the foreigners will remain indefinitely.
[RBC] workers said they were not offered jobs with iGATE and were told this “realignment” might expand to affect more of the bank’s 57,500 employees in Canada.
Citizenship and Immigration Minister and presumed PM-in-waiting Jason Kenney managed to express surprise that the temporary foreign worker program under his purview he has long touted as absolutely vital to Canadian interests would be so abused.Boycott Royal Bank of Canada as first suggested by blogger Norm Farrell. Do it. Yes, that means your Visa card too. Outsource your money to a credit union in your own community instead.Has anyone called this iGATE-gate yet? Allow me to be the first.
