Wells Fargo & Co. announced Tuesday it would lay off workers at its mortgaging service center in Fort Mill, S.C. While the bank says the layoffs reflect "the reality of the market," it's worth noting that Fort Mill is located just across the South Carolina border from Charlotte, N.C., home to Wachovia Bank Corp., which Wells plans to buy in December.
Wells didn't say how many of the mortgaging center's 1,600 employees would be laid off, but the company did say it would try to place affected employees in other positions within the company.
As The Charlotte Observer reports, in an October visit to Wachovia's Charlotte headquarters, Wells chief executive John Stumpf told Wachovia employees that his bank uses a "retain and retrain" strategy to help place employees whose jobs have been eliminated in new positions.
In other North Carolina banking news, shareholders of Merrill Lynch & Co. are slated to vote Dec. 5 on Charlotte-based Bank of America Corp.'s proposed $50 billion deal to buy the New York-based investment bank. As we've previously reported, that deal could result in
more than 25,000 job cuts.
- Suzanne Stevens
Join Corporate Dealmaker's LinkedIn forum
Juergen Lasowski
And the winners are...
