Banking industry to experiment again?

"The Australian bank, St George, proposes to enter our market through the back door of Foodstuff's supermarkets," says Andrew Casidy, Acting General Secretary of the bank workers' union, Finsec.

"This is a predictable outcome of years of banks in this country competing on the basis of who has the lowest costs.

"How will this help the country move towards a high skilled, high waged economy?

"Supermarkets don’t provide decent jobs with decent hours and decent pay now. This move won’t change that and will place additonal burdens on supermarket workers.

"Training is not likely to be a high priority and workplace safety is unikely to be up to banking industry norms.

"As the experience of Kiwibank shows, where shopping and banking are combined, queues grow at busy times of the day.

"Add to this poorly trained and inexperienced staff and we will see increasingly lower paid and unprotected groups of workers becoming the focus of customer frustration.

"The banking industry has always led the charge for free market compettion at the expense of workers so we're not surprised by this," Andrew Casidy concluded.

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