Fleet workers awaiting gain

Whether what is a bonanza for Fleet's largest stockholders will be as good for Fleet's workers or its customers is a very different question.

The contrast between the giddiness in the boardrooms and the wariness in the ranks this week speaks to the disconnect between the working men and women who labor at these corporations and the men who buy and sell them. Whatever happens to Fleet's 47,700 employees, Chad Gifford won't be out of work. Despite his anemic record as chairman of Fleet, he is poised to become chairman of the merged megabank.

The skepticism of workers and consumers is not nostalgia for venerable Boston firms and the men who made them. Eben D. Jordan of Jordan Marsh Co., Edwin Land of Polaroid Corp., and the companies they led have gone the way of the Boston Garden. Today's concerns are grounded very much in the modern world.

The question is not just whether there will be layoffs -- and there will be -- but whether the jobs that are retained stay in the United States or are sent overseas, where cheap labor means bigger profits. Just this month, Bank of America announced plans to move more IT, or information technology, jobs to India next spring. A well-educated, English-speaking labor force in Bangalore can do the same work for less money than workers in either Boston or Charlotte, N.C.

Bank of America is going so far as to open a subsidiary in India, rather than subcontract the work there, in order to protect its intellectual property. (A global corporation has to protect itself, after all, from being taken advantage of by the Third World economies it aims to exploit.)

According to a report issued last year by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the initial flirtation of large American companies with IT outsourcing is expanding to include call centers, accounting, and human resources functions because of the significant savings that can be realized.

Gifford and Bank of America CEO Kenneth D. Lewis said on Monday they are looking to cut costs by $1.6 billion by the end of next year.

What savings cannot be generated by layoffs and outsourcing are likely to come from higher consumer fees, according to Deirdre Cummings, the consumer program director for the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group. In a recent study for MassPIRG, Cummings found that the number of independent banks in the United States had dropped from 15,000 to 8,000 since 1984. Of the 8,000 that remain, the 100 largest control almost two-thirds of the assets.

"It's Economics 101: Less competition results in higher fees and poorer service," she says her study found.

It does not have to work out that way this time. Governor Mitt Romney and Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino have already expressed concern that the merger could mean an exodus of jobs from the local economy. Elected officials and state and federal regulators ought to demand more than the vague reassurances offered thus far.

Before the talk turns, as it inevitably will, to redundancies and duplication in the lower ranks of workers, it might be time to demand that executive compensation and golden parachutes be put on the table for negotiation. It is all well and good for Lewis to promise to maintain Fleet's level of charitable giving in Greater Boston but charity, as we all know, begins at home.

A waiver of annual bonuses by executives of both banks, a freeze on bank fees, and a pledge to keep Bank of America jobs in America would go a long way toward reassuring workers and consumers that what's good for Fleet shareholders is good for the rest of us.

Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com.