State Street will lay off some 150 employees. The cuts come even as the Boston-based firm is in the midst of offering a voluntary severance package to workers. Roughly 3,000 workers took up that offer, according to the Boston Globe. Only 1,800 cuts were targeted with the package.

The paper reports that the cuts are part of the slimming down the company announced in April. The voluntary package added an extra week of pay to the standard one or two weeks per year that State Street pays depending on the rank and position of the worker. It also allowed those taking it to retain their stock options.

The layoffs reportedly started yesterday. They were also a surprise to employees who had expected all of the cuts to be voluntary, according to the paper.

Speculation is that the layoffs were necessitated when not enough people in some areas of State Street took the company up on the voluntary severance package.  

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