Employee unions of ING Vysya Bank on Sunday demanded safeguarding of their interests post-merger with Kotak Bank and threatened to go on strike on January 7 the day on which the Bengaluru-headquartered lender will seek shareholders' nod to approve the Rs15,000-crore merger deal.
To ensure that interests of all the stakeholders are 'protected', S A Sridhar from the ING Vysya Bank officers' association said a "tri-partite agreement" between Kotak Mahindra Bank (KMB), ING Vysya Bank, and employees and officers, be signed which will lay out all points in detail. The All India ING Vysya Bank Employees Union and All India ING Vysya Bank Officiers Association, which together represent 35 per cent of the Bangalore-headquartered lender's over 10,000 employees as members, however, said they are not opposing the merger but want their interests to be protected.
"We have an apprehension as the new management at KMB does not have an Union and believes in outsourcing its work. What will be the fate of our employees after the mergerIJ" Ramkrishna Reddy, general secretary of the employees union told reporters. He added that recently KMB wrote to all the ING Vysya Bank employees to allay the concerns but 'bypassed' the unions. Reddy emphasised that the Uday Kotak-led bank should go through the union if it is "sincere" about its efforts.
ING Vysya Bank spokesperson could not be immediately reached for comment. However, a representative for ING Vysya Bank referred to legal opinion of advisors to the deal, which said such a tripartite agreement is "infructuous". There is no precedent of such an agreement in previous bank mergers, the legal opinion said, alleging that such a demand "seems to be red herring i.E. Something that misleads or distracts from relevant issues".