AIB offers unpaid leave to staff

THE STATE’S largest bank, Allied Irish Banks (AIB), has offered staff a range of options for unpaid and reduced paid leave in an effort to cut costs.

Staff with more than 20 years’ service at the bank are being offered up to nine months’ sabbatical leave on 20 per cent of their salary under the scheme.

Staff with between five and 20 years’ service are being offered up to double their annual holidays, or as much as six weeks’ unpaid leave, while all employees at AIB have the option to take two weeks’ additional unpaid leave.

The bank has received about 600 expressions of interest from staff and will be seeking “priority” applications to its scheme, entitled “AIB Time Out: More Time for You”, until next Thursday.

The bank has said it will sanction as many applications as possible but the scheme depends on the ability of the business “to facilitate the absence on a no-replacement basis”.

The scheme will run for the duration of this year and will be reviewed in 2010.

Staff in the bank’s divisions in the Republic and in the UK are among those eligible to apply.

The bank believes the option of sabbatical leave for nine months will appeal to staff who wish to undertake study or employees going on maternity leave.

AIB is the State’s biggest private sector employer with 13,500 staff and has so far avoided a redundancy programme, despite the crisis in the banking sector.

The bank reduced staff costs by 11 per cent to €1.4 billion in 2008 by cutting the number of external consultants, freezing pay and recruitment, and cutting bonuses and profit-share payments.

Its workforce dropped by 457 staff in 2008 as departing employees were not replaced. Some 250 outside consultants were not retained by the bank.

AIB grew operating profits by 18 per cent last year to €2.7 billion through aggressive cost-cutting, but a substantially higher bad debt charge of €1.85 billion left it with pretax profits of €1 billion, down 62 per cent on 2007.

The guaranteed Irish-owned financial institutions have avoided large-scale job losses in Ireland.

Bank of Ireland is cutting up to 600 jobs in its UK business.

Late last year Permanent TSB began offering employees up to €20,000 to take a two-year career break and up to €35,000 for three-year break in a bid to reduce costs.