AXA Union News

Union in talks with AXA over Project Libra

No doubt many staff in AXA Life will have read the communications from the company concerning Project Libra. The project is scheduled to run for two years and there will be a series of regular announcements and developments throughout the entire period.

This project is driven by the cost challenge faced by AXA Life for the Company to meet the targets set by Paris. The first major benchmark for this is 2008. It is clear that the intention is for there to be a substantial reduction in the number of employees by the end of the project.

Amicus is involved in a series of ongoing meetings with the company over the impact of Project Libra on staff and has advised AXA Life that they must demonstrate robust business cases for any changes they wish to make and that any proposed changes must be sustainable. Amicus have have stated that they are totally opposed to short sighted cost cutting.

The union-company AXA BS Action Team which has been set up to investigate the quality of work transferred to AXA Business Services and the impact on customers will obviously take a keen interest in any work offshored under Project Libra.

Amicus want to keep our members in a job. The main tools for achieving any reduction in headcount must be natural attrition and the use of retraining and redeployment to suitable alternative employment within AXA. It makes no sense for AXA to be incurring costs recruiting new employees at the same time they are looking to reduce staff numbers!

Amicus have advised AXA that if there is a requirement for redundancies these should be done on a voluntary basis wherever possible and that any compulsory redundancies must a last resort and be kept to the absolute minimum.

16th February 2006

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