Morning Coffee: Barclays bankers’ long list of grievances comes to nothing. UBS's latest layoffs are nothing new
As your grandparents might have told you, “once you find a single reason to be angry about something, you won’t have trouble finding dozens more”. Seldom has there been a better example of this proverb in action than the UK Employment Tribunal case which was recently decided largely in favour of Barclays and against three of its staff.
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The published judgement defies summary – it begins with exchanges of emails about a football-related knee injury, but then spirals into 460 pages of allegations of whistleblowing, racial discrimination, retaliation and much more.
The three complainants represented themselves in court and they seem to have worked very hard at doing so. The judgment notes that they provided over 12,000 pages of documents and 18 Excel spreadsheets detailing their many grievances, which included alleged racial discrimination, circumstances in which they were asked to do work they didn't want to do, and seemingly anodyne requests to return to the office weeks after a knee injury.
The story behind the story seems to be that “investment banks aren’t always as glamorous and fun as they look on TV”. The three worked in middle-office jobs in London, on the model validation team, doing necessary and demanding, but largely routine work checking risk management models and data. And although the workload was heavy and “stakeholders” often demanding, the pay was quite some way below front-office levels; one Assistant Vice President received a bonus of just £5k ($6.4k) on a basic salary around £60k.
In this sort of pressure-cooker environment, it’s easy for small grievances to get magnified. The bankers were ambitious to be promoted, but that would require
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