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As a result of Eastern Bank’s purhcase of HarborOne Bank, 75 employees will be laid off at HarborOne’s former headquarters.
“We write to respectfully inform you that circumstances will require Eastern Bank to conduct a layoff in conjunction with our recent merger with HarborOne Bank,” the bank wrote in a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, or WARN, letter to state labor officials.
Eastern completed the purchase last month.
The layoff will affect employees at the former HarborOne Bank corporate offices at 770 Oak St. Extension in Brockton. Eastern Bank plans to maintain the building for its ongoing operations.
The bank previously said it planned to close six of its own branches and seven HarborOne locations that were too close to each other. The bank predicted it would be able to streamline the combined operation’s costs by $55 million, or 40 percent of HarborOne’s pre-tax, non-interest operating expenses, once the merger is done.
Terminations associated with the layoff will take place beginning on Feb. 21 through May 31, the letter said. As of December 2024, HarborOne had 535 employees.
Eastern’s recent merger activity has come under fire from activist investor HoldCo Asset Management. The hedge fund wants the bank to sell itself and also believes Eastern should have allocated capital amassed in its IPO to share buybacks and shareholder distributions instead of buying several smaller competitors and significantly expanding its footprint into Rhode Island and New Hampshire. Eastern Bank responded to the activist investor during the bank’s third-quarter earnings call.
“We’re very open to engaging with our shareholders,” Dennis Sheahan, Eastern Bank CEO said during the call in response to an investment analyst’s question. “We’re happy to engage with any of our investors and what we believe is a shared goal. We and our investors are driving the performance of the company even higher than we’ve already done, and to build long term value creation for our shareholders. So we welcome that dialogue from whomever.”
Eastern Bank did not return a request for comment as of of publication time.
