WeChat post about 70 per cent pay cut by employee of Shanghai Pudong Development Bank unit sparks protest over salaries against lender’s IT vendor

The incident took place after an employee with the bank’s wealth-management subsidiary complained about a nearly 70 per cent pay cut. A screenshot of a post by the employee on WeChat was widely circulated on the Chinese social-media platform and touched a nerve with the IT vendor’s staff, who took up their own grievances.

“A strike and heavy salary cuts by a bank easily made headlines, because millions of Chinese employees are now unnerved by worries about wage incomes and job prospects,” said Ding Haifeng, a ­consultant at Shanghai-based financial advisory firm Integrity. “The protest, though on a small scale, will also sound an alarm among the country’s public security authorities, because they treat it as a threat to social stability.”

SPDB said in a statement that the strike outside an office building in the Lujiazui finance and trade zone in Shanghai was an internal dispute at the outsourced IT firm, whose management and staff were in talks to find common ground.

The bank also confirmed the pay cut mentioned in the WeChat post, adding that the sharp cut in salary was implemented because the employee in question had failed to pass a performance review. The employee had accepted the adjusted pay after communication by the bank’s wealth-management subsidiary.

A senior manager with the Shanghai-based bank told the Post that SPDB Wealth Management, a fully-owned unit set up two years ago to help clients manage their personal fortunes, uses a performance-based salary mechanism. It was not unusual that certain underachieving employees faced a 70 per cent reduction in their pay, he added. Other SPDB employees also faced some small pay cuts, with basic salaries remaining unchanged but performance-linked pay subject to some decline, he said.