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| Washington Mutual is laying off over a thousand people in Florida and Washington.
The Seattle-based thrift notified about 1,400 workers Tuesday they would be laid off, WaMu spokesman Timothy McGarry told MortgageDaily.com. Most will be out of work in July and some will stay on board until September. McGarry pointed out the affected employees are “overwhelmingly” call center workers serving retail banking business and that only “a very small portion” worked directly with mortgages. About 550 of the layoffs will occur at a regional operations center in Jacksonville, Fla., which currently employs about 2,500 call center jobs. The closing of a call center division in Bothell, Wash., will result in the other 850 job cuts, the spokesman said. Most of the work will be outsourced to the Philippines, and a “much smaller amount” will relocate to Wisconsin and New York, he added. The layoffs are tied to last November’s announcement that WaMu would reduce administrative costs by engaging in several initiatives such as consolidating real estate and relocating back office functions offshore. WaMu Chairman and Chief Executive, Kerry Killinger, previously stated the thrift expected to grow the number of offshore full-time employees from 1,600 to 6,000 over the next two years. “Yesterdays announcement is a step in realizing the 6,000 offshore employees,” McGarry said. In February, WaMu announced it would reduce its network mortgage support offices by 10 to 16 and cut approximately 2,500 jobs in the process. A month earlier, the lender told 64 post-funding employees at a mortgage lending operation in Florence, S.C., their job functions would be performed by a vendor in India. |
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Coco Salazar is an assistant editor and staff writer for MortgageDaily.com.e-mail: MortgageWriter@aol.com |
