Wells Fargo Chief Executive John Stumpf, whose company officially bought Wachovia last week, said in an interview Wednesday that minimizing job losses in the acquisition will be a priority, but cuts will begin this year.
Stumpf said he does not know how many jobs will be lost in the merger and did not provide a specific timeframe for the start of layoffs. He said the San Francisco-based bank already has taken steps such as a freezing new hiring and posting open jobs internally to make it easier to keep em- ployees at both Wachovia and Wells Fargo.
"I can tell you there will be duplicative jobs and there will be job loss, I know that," Stumpf said in a phone interview. "How many that will be, I do not know. I'm a big pro-jobs person, and the more customers we have, the more jobs we need, the more space we need to have our people, so all of that works together."
