Ethics in the digital workplace
Digitisation and automation technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), can affect working conditions in a variety of ways and their use in the workplace raises a host of new ethical concerns.
Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has announced plans to cut 2,600 insurance and retail banking jobs in the UK over the next twelve months. 2000 positions from 16,777 will be lost from it's insurance division, with the remaining 600 job losses concentrated in RBS's retail banking head offices in Edinburgh and London.
This latest announcement comes after the group had already announced approximately 20,000 jobs worldwide as part of cost cutting measures following financial crisis and the ill fated acquisition of ABN Amro. As part of the state aid package that RBS received, EU competition regulators in Brussels demanded that the Bank sell off its Direct Line and Churchill insurance businesses as well as more than 300 branches.
It is hoped that most of the job losses can be achieved through attrition and voluntary redundancies. An RBS spokesman said: "We are working hard to rebuild RBS in order to repay taxpayers for their support and having to cut jobs is the most difficult part of this process. We have strived at all times to be open and honest about the tough choices we are making. We will do all we can to support our staff through this process and do everything possible to keep compulsory redundancy to an absolute minimum."
Eurofound (2010), Royal Bank of Scotland, Internal restructuring in United Kingdom, factsheet number 70555, European Restructuring Monitor. Dublin, https://restructuringeventsprod.azurewebsites.net/restructuring-events/detail/70555.