SAN FRANCISCO–Workers at Wells Fargo are organizing the first union at a major U.S. bank—”in one of the least-organized industries in the country,” according to a new report.
Labor Notes, a publication backed by labor unions, reported the first branch where workers won a union vote, in 2023, was in Albuquerque, N.M., and that since then workers have voted to join the Communications Workers (CWA) at 29 more branches from Apopka, Fla., to Casper, Wyo.. So have 35 workers who review customer and employee complaints at the bank, Labor Notes said.
“These workers, a total of 200, are a small fraction of Wells Fargo’s 217,000 employees,” according to the publication. “But their organizing represents the first formal union effort since the company’s founding in 1852. And their success is even more notable in an almost entirely non-union industry.”
Few Workers Represented
Labor Notes said that less than 1% of the nation’s 4.5 million financial industry workers belong to a union.
Labor Notes said CWA launched the Committee for Better Banks a decade ago, with the goals of organizing bank workers and empowering them to assist regulators’ efforts to monitor the finance industry.
Since 2020, the union reported it has succeeded in organizing several small regional banks, but Wells Fargo is considerably larger, with more than 4,000 branches.
What Workers Say
According to Labor Notes, Wells Fargo workers say that staffing issues, low pay, and sales pressure are driving them to organize.
Labor Notes reported that since CEO Charlie Scharf took over in 2019, the company has cut more than 40,000 jobs.
Wells Fargo, of course, was caught pressuring branch staff into creating fake accounts to meet aggressive sales targets a decade ago, leading to the firing of thousands of workers and to having a rare asset growth cap placed on it by the Federal Reserve.
The cap was recently lifted.
