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Baltimore-area Bank of America Workers Face Job Cuts

Bank of America intends to cut an estimated 30,000 jobs over the next two years, but is offering few details.

Bank of America executives confirmed Monday that they intend massive company-wide job cuts over the next two years, but employees at the Baltimore area’s leading bank continue to be left in the dark about how the plans will affect them.

“I truly don’t know” what the local impact will be, confessed William Couper, president of the Mid-Atlantic Region for the bank. “It’s premature to estimate” how many of the bank’s workers in Maryland will lose their jobs, he told Patch.

At corporate headquarters in Charlotte, NC, spokeswoman Nicole Nastacie said the company would be providing no geographic breakdown of the estimated 30,000 job cuts. The cuts will include all different business segments of the corporation, she said, and no single geographic area will be spared entirely.

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The bank currently has about 2,000 employees in Baltimore City and Baltimore County, and about 4,000 statewide in Maryland, according to state Department of Business and Economic Development. Baltimore County, with about 1,200 Bank of America employees, has the highest concentration of company workers in any single county in the state.

Most employees work in the bank's 189 retail branch offices across Maryland, although there is also a credit processing facility in Hunt Valley and a regional headquarters office in Rockville. The Hunt Valley facility already has seen job cuts this year—the bank announced in March that it would eliminate about 40 jobs there.

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Michael Raia, a spokesman for the Maryland Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation, said the agency is gearing up to respond to the job cuts despite the lack of any definitive information from Bank of America.

“The Maryland Department of Labor is watching the news, and staff from the Dislocated Service Unit will be available to provide rapid response if and when Bank of America makes public any plans for layoffs in Maryland,” Raia said.

“DLLR provides a full range of services to dislocated workers and job seekers, including initiatives designed to bolster new and incumbent worker skills to better compete in the new economy,” he said.

The confirmation Monday of the 30,000 cuts over the next two years follows disclosure last month the company is in the process of companywide in 2011.

Like the larger cuts planned for 2012 and 2013, Bank of America has refused to publicly disclose the geographic locations of the 6,000 job cuts, or comment on the local impact of eliminating jobs.

Bank of America, which by many measures is the country’s largest bank, employs a total of about 288,000 workers, according to recent company statements. If current plans are fully realized, the company will have eliminated the jobs of roughly 12 percent of its employees by the end of 2014.

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