More than three percent of the Boston Behemoth's workforce is saying goodbye, and many of those employees did so last week.

Spokespeople for Fidelity [profile] confirm to the Boston Business Journal, the Boston Globe and the Triangle Business Journal that more than 1,500 of Fido's 45,000 employees accepted the voluntary buyout offer that the Boston-based mutual fund giant extended back in February. The buyout offer was targeted at Fidelity employees age 55 and up with at least 10 years tenure at the company, and most of those who accepted the offer left by last Friday, June 30.

"That's a lot of right-sizing," John Bonnanzio, editor of the Fidelity Monitor & Insight newsletter, tells the Globe.

The buyouts were not targeted geographically or at specific business units, Fidelity spokesman Vin Loporchio tells the Globe. Yet the uptake rate varied from 0.5 percent of employees to 6 percent of employees in different regions, Fidelity spokesman Adam Banker tells the Business Journal. Banker calls the program "very successful," drawing "very positive reactions and compliments from the employees who participated." He declined to comment on how employees specifically in the Triangle (i.e. the Research Triangle area in North Carolina, which includes Chapel Hill, Durham, and Raleigh) accepted the offer.

The terms of the buyout package, the Globe now reports, include: four to six weeks of severance pay per year of service; and being able to stay on the company health care plan, at current employee cost, for 18 months.

Loporchio declined to comment to the Globe on whether more headcount changes are coming. Yet he tells the paper that the plan is to backfill some of the jobs vacated by employees taking the buyout offer and that the Boston Behemoth currently has, in the Globe's words, "several hundred open positions." 

Edited by: Neil Anderson, Managing Editor


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