Wells Fargo branch workers vote to form union in a first for major US bank

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Workers at a Wells Fargo bank branch in Albuquerque on Wednesday voted to form a union, making them the first employees of a major US bank to unionise in the latest sign of the resurgence of the labour movement in America.

The workers, who voted 5-3 in favour of organising, will be part of Wells Fargo Workers United, a union formed in 2021 that is associated with the Communications Workers of America. The election was overseen by the National Labor Relations Board.

“We respect our employees’ rights to vote for union representation,” Wells Fargo said in a statement. “At the same time, we continue to believe our employees are best served by working directly with the company and its leadership.”

Wells Fargo staff at a separate branch in Bethel, Alaska, will hold their own election on whether to unionise on Thursday. Workers at a third branch of the bank in Atwater, California, filed for a representation election earlier this month. Organisers say that workers at several of Wells Fargo’s corporate offices are also interested in forming unions.

The votes cover a very small fraction of Wells Fargo’s overall workforce. But they come as unions have made inroads at other businesses, including Starbucks cafés and Amazon warehouses, even as nationwide union membership has persistently declined. 

Workers at the Albuquerque Wells Fargo location said they began to organise in December 2020 after a Zoom call with chief executive Charlie Scharf led them to believe that the bank was ignoring their concerns about stagnant salaries, understaffing and a lack of career mobility in the bank’s 4,500 branches.

Jobs in bank branches have disappeared as the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated a shift to mobile banking. The federal labour department expects the number of bank tellers in the US will shrink 15 per cent between 2022 and 2032. Last year the country’s roughly 364,000 tellers earned an average of $36,800, according to labour department data.

The introduction of “enhanced ATMs”, which allow customers to chat by video with an off-site employee, also led banks to reduce the number of workers at each branch, according to a labour department analysis. Wells Fargo workers have said that the trend has made their jobs more stressful as they struggle to help customers who prefer to bank with human tellers.

While 10.1 per cent of US workers are members of a labour union, just 1.3 per cent of finance workers are. The share is less than any other industry aside from food service and technical services. When the 600,000-member Communications Workers of America negotiated a contract for employees at Beneficial State Bank in 2021, it said it was the first new union at a US bank for 40 years. 

CWA organiser Nick Weiner, who has worked with Wells Fargo employees looking to unionise, said that Bank of America and Citigroup staffers had already contacted CWA to express their interest in organising, complaining of similar issues to those cited by their Wells Fargo counterparts.

“The support for a union at Wells Fargo both within the bank and from the outside community is unprecedented,” Weiner said in a statement after the vote.

Alexander Watts, a Wells Fargo employee in St Louis who has been involved in the union, said he hoped that his colleagues in Albuquerque would inspire other bank workers to unionise too. The pay raises negotiated by unionised autoworkers, actors and screenwriters earlier this year convinced him that such victories might be possible for bank staff, he said.

“We are the first ones to get the ball rolling, but when we are successful, it will be everyone’s success within the industry, except for the executives.”