UBS says top workers leaving for better pay
UBS is losing key employees to competitors because Switzerland's largest bank can no longer offer them competitive salaries, the bank's chairman has said.
In an interview published in a Bern newspaper on Saturday, Kaspar Villiger said political pressure to change the way the bank pays employees has made it difficult to retain them, especially in the United States.
“We’ve noticed that we’re systematically losing employees we need in certain important sectors,” he said, pointing to UBS’s “big steps toward political wishes” as a reason for the loss.
If government starts regulating salaries, all of the country will lose, said the former finance minister from the centre-right Radical Party. Such regulation would be “the dumbest” decision a country like Switzerland could make.
Villiger did not offer details on employees but did acknowledge that UBS’s rash of layoffs has also hurt workers’ sense of job security.
UBS posted a net loss of SFr2 billion ($1.78 billion) for the first quarter of 2009.
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