by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street
“Lower interest rates… reduced our earnings in 2020 and will put pressure on our profitability this year.” After having promised, no layoffs in 2020. But this is 2021.
Northern Trust Corporation’s promise early in the Pandemic to abstain from layoffs in 2020 expired on January 1, and last week, the layoffs happened. There was no announcement of the layoffs, and as of this moment, there still hasn’t been a public announcement, but on January 7, two days after people started reporting that they’d been laid off, or that some of their colleagues had been laid off, Chairman and CEO Mike O’Grady sent an email to the remaining employees about the layoffs, the “majority” of which had been “completed earlier this week” he said – meaning January 4th through 6th.
Mike O’Grady said in the email, which WOLF STREET has reviewed, that the bank made “the extremely difficult decision” to lay off 500 people, or “about 2.5% of our partners.”