Bank of Baroda account holder? Good news! Employees union calls off strike

It's a good news for the customers of state-owned Bank of Baroda. The bank will allow its customers to do various financial transactions like withdrawal, deposits, drafts, etc. hassle free on January 07. It was known that the bank employees unions were supposed to carry a nationwide strike against government’s decision for merging BoB with Vijaya Bank and Dena Bank. This mega-merger, which is first in Indian state-owned banks, has been a cause of concern and last year there were multiple strikes were held opposing the decision. Noteworthy, BoB-Vijaya-Dena Bank merger would create India’s third largest bank. In a filing to BSE today, BoB revealed that, All India Bank of Baroda Employees’ Co-ordination Committee and Bank of Baroda Karmachari Sena strike which was supposed to take place on January 07, will not take place. The bank intimated about the strike on January 02. The bank employees have protested against the proposed amalgamation of Vijaya Bank and Dena Bank with Bank of Baroda on multiple occasions. Last month, close to 1 million employees protested for nearly 5 days against the proposed merger which hampered the banks services to quite an extent.

The major demands of unions were - immediate settlement of wage negotiations and assurance from the government that there will be no bank merger of BoB, Vijaya and Dena. 

However, now BoB customers can rejoice as their financial transactions on January 07, will not be hit. 

Interestingly, even though unions fear this mega merger, analysts have given a thumbs up for BoB-Vijaya-Dena consolidation.

However, Kotak Institutional Equities highlighted one challenge that can be a concern for employees. Analysts at Kotak said, “The merger has surprisingly seen far fewer resistances from employees than what one would had anticipated, which is positive. However, this could resurface in the next stage. The challenges of integration of IT systems, employee satisfaction, branch rationalization, client experiences at the time of merger are issues that are hard to model."

They added, “ Importantly, we would need the current MD and CEO of the bank, P.S. Jayakumar to be available through the entire process as he has been quite instrumental in reviving the business of Bank of Baroda in recent years.”

As of 2018, BoB has workforce of 55,662 employees, whereas Vijaya Bank has about 16,079 and Dena Bank has nearly 13,613, as per Kotak data.