In a 2022 letter to shareholders, Wells Fargo chief executive Charles Scharf insisted that “we have a different company today” and that “hubris, contempt and indifference” were no longer acceptable there. “We will listen and not retaliate,” Scharf pledged at a Senate Banking Committee hearing last year, when asked whether he’d interfere with unionization efforts. But even before the Albuquerque and Bethel branches moved to unionize, employees at Wells Fargo branches were filing unfair labor practice charges. Democrat Sherrod Brown, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, detailed some of these in an October letter to Acting Comptroller of the Currency Michael Hsu and Federal Reserve Vice Chair Michael Barr. Since May, Wells Fargo managers have been charged with either threatening or retaliating against employees engaged in union activity in Salt Lake City; Des Moines, Iowa; San Antonio; Beaverton, Oregon; and Chandler and Lake Havasu, Arizona. The bank settled the Salt Lake City case, and an NLRB regional director ruled against the bank in the Beaverton case.
Yes, we are only talking about 13 bank workers, but every movement starts somewhere. Ten years ago, Barbara and John Ehrenreich—who coined the term “professional-managerial class” in 1977—revisited the subject and found that people with “college and higher degrees have proved to be no more indispensable, as a group, to the American capitalist enterprise than those who honed their skills on assembly lines or in warehouses or foundries.” Frustration with that circumstance is now causing a wide swath of the professional-managerial class to unionize, and banks are an especially ripe target. It’s not hard to imagine the Wells Fargo unionization drive spreading to the better-behaved American banks.
At the 2022 Senate Banking Committee hearing, the chief executives of the six biggest banks in America all pledged, alongside Scharf, never to interfere with union drives, but it was interesting to watch many of them stumble over their words before answering. It goes against their instincts and their likely future behavior. Let the outsize agitating begin.