No help for aggrieved StanChart sales agents

Staff Writer | Monday June 24, 2013 00:00

On Friday, Botswana Bank Employees Union (BOBEU) chairman Jayson Chakalisa told The Monitor they cannot help the affected workers simply because they are not union members. According to Chakalisa, BOBEU's union membership is drawn from permanent employees, and not the banks' contracted staff.

Standard Chartered Bank's new strategy of motivating its contracted sales agents and some staff members by slashing their monthly commission by half, has been criticised by the affected workers who say it is cruel. They have told The Monitor that from the sales target of five credit cards, one gets P500 as commission. Failure to make P500 from the credit card sales, a sales agent who makes P13,000 from other sales, is punished by having their salary slashed by half.

Chakalisa, who also works for Standard Chartered Bank, says the affected workers' only course of action would be to approach the courts, as the union cannot come to their rescue.Last week some affected workers told The Monitor that they had been to Bank of Botswana about the matter, but the official who assisted them at the central bank advised them to take up the matter with the union first.

In their response to The Monitor, Standard Chartered Bank's spokesperson Tumie Ramsden said the bank has an incentive structure to promote sales of certain products. She said that this structure, along with others in place, is established on the company's business strategy and requirements and was implemented with prior notice and sign off.  The new incentives structure is applicable only to contracted sales agents and a few contracted employees. She said it does not cover permanent staff.

Ramsden also added that the bank has not deducted any salaries from the sales reps. A former contracted sales agent who quit, said after fighting her battle, the bank is now saying that it will pay back all her dues.Another sales executive, a contracted employee, says she lost P6,000 recently after managing to log-in four credit card applications.