Job Cuts Announced At M & I

7/22/11 – About 475 jobs will be cut after the parent company of Harris Bank acquired Milwaukee’s M & I banking chain. Jim Kappel of B-M-O Harris said the layoffs would take place during the next four months throughout the company’s Midwest region. Thirteen branches will close – including one in Wisconsin that was planned by M & I before B-M-O Harris finalized its acquisition on July fifth. Some duplicative executive posts had been cut earlier, but the announcement represents the company’s first mass-scale job reductions. About 100 of the job cuts will be in Metro Milwaukee, and Kappel says half those people will be offered jobs at one of B-M-O’s vendors – mostly in human resources and security. Kappel notes that about 400 other positions in the newly-merged Harris chain are vacant – and the laid-off employees can apply for those. M & I, which has a branch in Beaver Dam, had about 43-hundred jobs throughout southeast Wisconsin when the B-M-O Harris acquisition was first announced last December.