Lowe's-RONA plans to transfer hundreds of jobs to India

This is the worst-case scenario for employees of the Lowe's-RONA hardware store. Three years after buying RONA, the American giant Lowe's is preparing to transfer part of the Boucherville headquarters in Bangalore, India.

More than 200 Quebec employees will lose their jobs, TVA Nouvelles said. The multinational plans to transfer virtually all jobs in India to information technology.

The layoffs will be announced "in the coming year," confidential sources said, as they are not allowed to talk about it publicly.

Lowe's already employs 2,000 workers in its Indian offices in Bangalore, in the south of the country. Computer engineers earn about $ 14,000 a year, according to the specialist site Glassdoor.ca. "Cheap labor" compared to the $ 100,000 earned by these same engineers in Quebec.

At the Boucherville head office, several senior executives have already been instructed to plan the transition, without informing the employees concerned. Under the restructuring plan, Indian engineers would be partly responsible for the computer systems of the 600 Canadian stores.

Online sales management, mobile technologies and data analysis would also be transferred to Lowe's offices in North Carolina.

The company refused the interview requests about his intentions. "Like any responsible company, we are always concerned about controlling our costs and looking for opportunities to optimize our operations across our network," Valerie Gonzalo, spokesperson for Lowe's Canada, said by email.

The prospect of seeing the Boucherville head office shrink is worrying Quebec suppliers to the company. "If ever there was a recentralization of the supply service, with buyers posted elsewhere than here, in the United States, there would be strong reasons to be worried," said Richard Darveau, CEO of the Quebec Association of hardware and building materials.

When Lowe's took over RONA in 2016, she promised to keep the head office in Boucherville. The American did not, however, commit to keeping a specific number of employees at the end of the transaction.