The Com­mit­tee for Bet­ter Banks (CBB), a Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Work­ers of Amer­i­ca (CWA)-affiliated com­mu­ni­ty and labor coali­tion, was cre­at­ed in 2013 to put an end to that. Cas­saun­dra Plum­mer, a Mary­land-based CBB mem­ber cur­rent­ly employed as a bank teller at TD Bank, told In These Times, ​“A lot of the issues with­in the banks are not dis­cussed, they’re kept real­ly qui­et. As a young woman, I always thought that work­ing at a bank was more of a pres­ti­gious job than retail. Once I actu­al­ly got into bank­ing, I real­ized that it’s not a whole lot different.”

Walk­ing into a bank, a cus­tomer is usu­al­ly inter­act­ing with a teller dressed in busi­ness attire. The cloth­ing gives the impres­sion of rel­a­tive­ly high, sta­ble wages, maybe even a com­fort­able perch some­where in the mid­dle or upper-mid­dle class. But the col­lared shirts and pressed slacks may be hid­ing the real­i­ty: a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of cus­tomer ser­vice work­ers in the retail bank­ing indus­try make salaries low enough to make pub­lic assis­tance necessary.

The CBB, which has grown from eight lead mem­bers in April to approx­i­mate­ly 60 in six dif­fer­ent states today, with thou­sands more either engaged through peti­tion sign­ing or attend­ing ral­lies. CBB is hop­ing to expand and cre­ate a crit­i­cal mass of orga­nized work­ers by bring­ing these issues out in the open.

A study released by the Nation­al Employ­ment Law Project (NELP) ear­ly this month shored up CBB claims, find­ing that 30.4% of the 1.7 mil­lion retail bank­ing employ­ees across the coun­try — more than 500,000 work­ers — are paid less than $15 an hour. Near­ly three-quar­ters of low-wage bank work­ers are bank tellers, 84.3% of which are women.

Anoth­er report, pub­lished by the UC Berke­ley Labor Cen­ter last year, found that these low-wages led 31% of bank teller fam­i­lies toward enrolling in pub­lic assis­tance pro­grams (com­pared to 25 per­cent of the entire work­force). ​“The cost of pub­lic ben­e­fits to fam­i­lies of bank tellers is near­ly $900 mil­lion per year,” says the report .

Though it was labeled an ​“occu­pa­tion­al win­ner” by the Bureau of Labor Sta­tis­tics for its 84% through­out its growth in the 1970s, the intro­duc­tion and pro­lif­er­a­tion of auto­mat­ed teller machines helped put the brakes on that, lead­ing to a pro­ject­ed 1% growth over the next decade. As Tim­o­thy Noah not­ed for Slate in 2010, banks tellers earn ​“slight­ly less than [they] did in 1970,” putting the job at the cen­ter of wage stag­na­tion that has become com­mon-place through­out the mid­dle class, espe­cial­ly with­in the con­text of expec­ta­tions of high­er productivity.

CEO com­pen­sa­tion and exec­u­tive pay indeed remain at wor­ry­ing heights. The NELP report found that CEOs of Wells Far­go and Bank of Amer­i­ca made amounts equal to more than 500 times the annu­al earn­ings of an aver­age bank teller. Stephen Lern­er, the archi­tect of SEIU’s famed Jus­tice for Jan­i­tors cam­paign, summed up the wealth dis­par­i­ty among bankers at the top and bot­tom of the pay brack­ets in a 2010 New Labor Forum arti­cle , writ­ing, ​“We could increase pay by $2.00 per hour and pro­vide employ­er-paid health insur­ance for over 550,000 tellers with just 3.6 per­cent of the bonus­es paid out to executives.”

“The con­stant focus on mak­ing more forces the peo­ple work­ing in the bank to take on more work, but we’re being paid the same amount,” says Plum­mer. ​“We’re not expect­ing to become wealthy off of entry-lev­el posi­tions. But the cor­po­ra­tions make a lot of mon­ey off of the things that we do — the sales goals, and all that we have to do to cre­ate wealth for the bank. It should be rec­i­p­ro­cat­ed back to the employees.”

By shift­ing tra­di­tion­al bank­ing ser­vices toward automa­tion, low-wage bank work­ers such as bank tellers and per­son­al bankers have also become the front­line for push­ing finan­cial prod­ucts on to cus­tomers in an effort to increase prof­its. The pres­sure of sales quo­tas imposed by man­age­ment and exec­u­tives at the top keeps low-wage bank work­ers under more scruti­ny than ever before. Cus­tomer ser­vice employ­ees in retail banks must not only attempt to hook patrons onto core retail bank­ing ser­vices like check­ing and sav­ings accounts, but must also resort to hawk­ing mort­gages and cred­it cards in ways CBB orga­niz­ers say can be preda­to­ry. Tellers risk ter­mi­na­tion if they fail to meet quo­tas for such products.

“Wells Far­go cre­ates an envi­ron­ment of hos­til­i­ty and humil­i­a­tion. Mul­ti­ple times I wit­nessed man­age­ment behav­ing in a con­de­scend­ing fash­ion to those who did not meet ​‘goals’ even though their cus­tomer ser­vice was excel­lent. Wells no longer cares about cus­tomer ser­vice or the best inter­est of their cus­tomers; they are only look­ing to push prod­ucts and most of the time they are unnec­es­sary prod­ucts,” one bank employ­ee told the Com­mit­tee of Bet­ter Banks when they sur­veyed 5,000 work­ers for the afore­men­tioned study at the group’s conception.

Accord­ing an April 2015 report by the Cen­ter for Pop­u­lar Democ­ra­cy, since 2011, 17 dif­fer­ent law­suits across the top five banks in the coun­try (JPMor­gan Chase, Bank of Amer­i­ca, Cit­i­group, Wells Far­go, and US Bank) have been set­tled for near­ly $46 bil­lion, ​“high­light­ing a range of alleged ille­gal and uneth­i­cal busi­ness practices.”

A 2013 Los Ange­les Times inves­ti­ga­tion report­ed that the pres­sure of sales goals, which increase U.S retail banks’ prof­its, has led some bank work­ers to com­mit fraud, forg­ing sig­na­tures, open­ing secret check­ing accounts with fees attached, or even cred­it lines for cus­tomers in order to keep up with their sales goals. This has led to law­suits from cus­tomers and even cities decry­ing the rigid and unfair sales cul­ture fos­tered by the bank­ing indus­try. When these prac­tices become pub­lic, banks fire employ­ees and man­agers in alleged attempts to uphold eth­i­cal finance.

But as Khalid Taha, one of the first Com­mit­tee mem­bers in Cal­i­for­nia, cur­rent­ly employed at Wells Far­go in San Diego, describes it, the ​“impos­si­ble” sales goals come from the top and work­ers ulti­mate­ly have no oth­er option. ​“They fire the entry lev­el employ­ees which is us, but if you think about it, yes we are respon­si­ble for it, but we are also vic­tims,” says Taha. ​“We have to keep our jobs, pay our rent. We have no way but to go a lit­tle bit shady when we deal with our cus­tomers because the com­pa­ny wants to meet their quo­ta. They don’t care how.”

Beyond low pay, CBB has been work­ing to con­nect these pres­sur­ized work envi­ron­ments to their detri­men­tal effects on the econ­o­my caused by the bank’s busi­ness practices.

The top four retail banks in the coun­try (JPMor­gan Chase, Bank of Amer­i­ca, Cit­i­group, and Wells Far­go), part of the too-big-to-fail bank­ing insti­tu­tions that some, like pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Sen. Bernie Sanders, have called to be bro­ken up, now col­lec­tive­ly pos­sess assets equiv­a­lent to 45% of the U.S econ­o­my, a slight increase than what it was in 2008 before that year’s finan­cial crisis.

Lern­er, who is cur­rent­ly advis­ing CBB as a fel­low at the Kalmanovitz Ini­tia­tive for Labor and the Work­ing Poor at George­town Uni­ver­si­ty, told In These Times, ​“This cam­paign is dif­fer­ent from many union cam­paigns that say ​‘our sole goal is win­ning bet­ter con­di­tions for work­ers.’ Those cam­paigns are impor­tant, [but] in this case we’re say­ing that you can’t win bet­ter con­di­tions for work­ers unless you reform the indus­try — and you can’t reform the indus­try unless work­ers are help­ing reform it.”

At an April 2015 ral­ly in Min­neso­ta where they deliv­ered 11,000 sig­na­tures on a peti­tion call­ing for an end to sales goals, the Com­mit­tee for Bet­ter Banks released a pro­posed bill of rights for bank work­ers. One of the planks of the bill address­es what they say is com­mu­ni­ty suf­fer­ing at the hands of banks: ​“We must elim­i­nate unrea­son­able sales goals or per­for­mance met­rics that force us to push unnec­es­sary prod­ucts on our cus­tomers. We are here for our neigh­bors — for the child who opens his first sav­ings account, for the new­ly­wed cou­ple plan­ning ahead to retire­ment, for the senior cit­i­zen open­ing a cred­it card. We want to be hon­est bro­kers of your finan­cial secu­ri­ty, and that means an end to pres­sure tac­tics that only serve to line share­hold­ers’ pockets.”

“We’re at the very begin­ning of a baby-steps cam­paign to build work­ing sup­port for the idea that we need to do two things, and that come simul­ta­ne­ous­ly: We need to address how bank work­ers unfair­ly — low pay, etc., but we need to con­nect with how the finance indus­try behaves is bad for the over­all econ­o­my,” Lern­er says.

In 2010, Lern­er was launch­ing SEIU’s new plan to orga­nize bank work­ers. Mike Elk described that effort as ema­nat­ing from his real­iza­tion that banks influ­enced the rest of labor orga­niz­ing through its close con­nec­tions to the pen­sions and invest­ment banks that inter­twined with finan­cial deci­sions made not only by work­ers but their com­mu­ni­ties, as well.

At the time, fel­low jour­nal­ist Steve Ear­ly told Elk, “[Suc­cess­ful orga­niz­ing] require[s] a long-term com­mit­ment that few unions are will­ing to make, even when deal­ing with a strate­gic multi­na­tion­al tar­get that’s not going away.” Lern­er left SEIU lat­er that year under dis­put­ed cir­cum­stances , and his work orga­niz­ing bank employ­ees was aban­doned by the union.

CEO and Pres­i­dent of union-owned Amal­ga­mat­ed Bank, Kei­th Mestrich announced in ear­ly August that the bank’s employ­ees would be mak­ing at least $15 an hour under their new col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing agree­ment. He told Buz­zfeed, ​“We think it’s the right thing for our bank to do, and frankly we think it’s the right thing for all banks to do. … If any indus­try in this coun­try can afford to set a new min­i­mum for its work­ers, it’s the bank­ing industry.”

But in the rest of the nonunion­ized retail bank­ing indus­try, CBB, like the Fight for 15 and OUR Wal­mart, will be agi­tat­ing for improvements.

“It was a lit­tle bit scary at the begin­ning, but we have to do it. If we don’t talk then the banks will do what­ev­er they want to do,” says Taha.

The Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Work­ers of Amer­i­ca is a spon­sor of In These Times. Spon­sors play no role in edi­to­r­i­al content.