Fewer refinance transactions have more than 500 interim mortgage jobs at Wells Fargo & Co. being eliminated.
Earlier this month, more than 200 Wells Fargo Home Mortgage employees in St. Louis were advised they would be laid off. The employees were short-term workers hired to handle elevated refinance business.
A few days before that, the company notified the State of Iowa that it will layoff 142 employees during the next two months. A spokesman said the layoffs impact “interim members” who were hired on a temporary basis to help with the higher level of refinance transactions.
“We did some make some other notifications in other markets,” the spokesman explained at the time — though he declined to quantify the layoffs except to say that the Iowa layoffs were part of a move to cut 20 percent of its total interim mortgage staff.
A week earlier, Wells Fargo said it was eliminating 145 wholesale lending employees in Southern California who were originally hired on a short-term basis to handle refinances.
Today, the spokesman said that a Workers Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act filing was made in Texas for more than 100 employees. (after the publication of this story, Wells Fargo clarified that a WARN notice had not been filed even though the employees had been given 60 days’ notice) The impacted positions are interim retail employees located in the Dallas-suburb of Addison.
“It’s the same situation that we found ourselves in a couple weeks ago,” Wells Fargo spokesman Jason Menke said in a telephone interview “These were interim team members hired for short-term assignments primarily to assist us with application volume in the last several months.”
Wells Fargo & Co. employed 272,200 as of Dec. 31, 2010.
