RBC sold its reputation to foreign workers

One of the facts of life in today's minute-by-minute news cycle is that once a story leaps into the social network's parallel universe, all control of the message is lost.

CBC News broke the story Friday that RBC — Canada's largest bank — was laying off Canadian IT staff to hire foreign workers. By the time the bank's spin doctors could respond for mainstream media, CBC had already aired an interview with bank staff who said they were assigned to train the foreign workers who would replace them.

By then, the Facebook/Twitter-verse was already calling for a boycott of RBC. Once that digital divide is crossed, no quarter will be given for a restatement of the facts. Very little room is made on discussion threads for unpopular analysis.

In that realm, trolls lay in ambush, hiding behind as many assumed names as can be imagined.

Greg Grice, RBC’s head of Enterprise Services and chief procurement officer will not get much of a hearing in that forum. But never mind, he's got federal officials to worry about.

Last week, the feds had to announce Canada had shed 54,500 jobs in March. In February, RBC announced a first-quarter profit of $2.07 billion.

Which stat do you think the federal government worries most about?

Especially since the government took some heat for bragging out of one side of its mouth about the strength of the Canadian banking system through the global financial crisis, while assuring the banks of $144 billion in loans and cash infusions through the other.

That figure represented fully seven per cent of Canada's GDP; $3,400 for every Canadian.

RBC certainly got its share of that tax-backed bonanza. Their “support” came to 63 per cent of the banking giant's value at the time: $25 billion.

Twenty-five billion ought to buy you some loyalty. Especially when it was given while the government put a lot of its credibility chips into assuring Canadians (and the world) that Canada's banking system was as sound as a Canadian dollar.

The bank's disloyalty is all the more galling because it appears RBC and its subcontractor iGate Corp seem to have gotten a fast track around the rules of foreign employment.

Go ahead, Red Deer business owners, try and bring foreign information technology workers into Canada, as a prelude to outsourcing your IT services overseas, which is what RBC is doing.

Convince your local MP that it's a good idea. Good luck.

The paperwork will kill you. You have to prove there is not a living, breathing qualified Canadian around willing to do the job. You'll find that there are lots of living, breathing, well-trained (and tax-paying) Canadian IT specialists, who are more than willing to work.

Red Deer College graduates a whole busload of them, every year — paid for in large measure by our tax dollars.

So how does RBC and iGate get around that? Good question.

A mining company in B.C. managed to get around that by making fluency in Mandarin a job requirement. But that door has since been closed.

Canada does need to import workers in a variety of skilled trades. But I really doubt IT support is one of them.

Companies with resources to skirt the spirit of Canadian law should not be bringing in low-paid foreign workers on temporary visas, with the intention of displacing Canadians, and the plan of laying them off again, without benefits, when doing so becomes convenient.

We call that exploitation. There is no partnership in this between the workers and the employers.

Doing so as a prelude to outsourcing the entire department overseas is to sell out a very profitable (and very much tax-supported) bank's reputation.

Let's think about those Canadian RBC workers for a moment. Dave Moreau told CBC that he and others are being made to train the new workers who will be taking their jobs. In a whole lot of work places, talking to the media that way is disloyalty, a firing offense.

That would make Moreau ineligible for the outplacement services of RBC who says they are “working diligently to find suitable roles for those affected.”

So it took some courage and personal integrity for that Canadian to blow the whistle.

No such courage or integrity is needed on the part of RBC; only a ton of brass.

Such brass is the legitimate meat of online activists who want you to outsource your RBC account to a bank that's more loyal to Canada.