Hungry Italians devour sleepy Bavarians
The big European banking story at the moment is the impending takeover of Bavaria's HVB Group by the Italian Unicredito in what would be Europe's biggest cross-border banking deal, creating the region's ninth-largest bank by market value. Reuters is saying that an agreement is expected to be announced early next week.
Two items caught my eye while reading about the negotiations. Firstly, the German banking unions are demanding five-year job guarantees after the takeover; secondly, English is going to be the working language of the bank. When I saw the latter, I was struck by a wave of nostalgia because a decade ago I taught English in the institution that's about to become part of Unicredito, and in my time at the headquarters of Bayerische Vereinsbank, as it was then called, I had an epiphany that foretold the takeover which is now about to become a fact. Regular readers of Rainy Day will recall the posting of Friday, 28 February 2003, titled Reclining, declining Bavarian bankers, which contained this anecdote:
One afternoon while making my way around the maze of offices near Kardinal Faulhaber Straβe, which have since been replaced by an upmarket shopping mall, I opened a door and found a roomful of bankers dozing away. I had entered what was called the Liegeraum ('reclining room'). Such was the genteel corporate culture of the time that employees were encouraged to take a rest after lunch."
Because the word "globalization" wasn't part of the general lexis back then, the snoring bankers weren't troubled by dark daydreams filled with hungry competitors from a flattening world preparing to eat their splendid lunch. Unsurprisingly, my best efforts to equip them with the sword of English and the shield of free-market ideology were met with smiles and yawns. Big Mistake. In 1999, the sleepy-headed Bayerische Vereinsbank stumbled into a disasterous merger with its main local rival and it's been nightmare city ever since then. Now, the Italians are taking over and they mean business.
That the German banking unions are demanding five-year job guarantees after the Unicredito takeover shows that they're still slumbering in the cultural Liegeraum. They just don't get it. They don't understand that most of these jobs will be outsourced anyway, guarantees or not. Maybe they should read this article. It's some two years old now, but that's fine for people who are catching up with the world.
