Wells Fargo becomes first major bank with unionized branch

A group of Wells Fargo (WFC) employees in Albuquerque, New Mexico voted to form a union, a move that makes Wells Fargo the first major U.S. bank to have a unionized branch.

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Video Transcript

SEANA SMITH: Wells Fargo becoming the first big US bank with a unionized branch. Now the bank's employees in Albuquerque, New Mexico voting 5 to 3 to join Wells Fargo Workers United. A branch in Bethel, Alaska had been scheduled to vote on joining the union today but withdrew its effort. And this is according to a report from Reuters. Now this comes as other branches in both Florida and California are petitioning to also join.

Brad, we're talking about this just because this has certainly been the year it seems like of these unionization efforts. The fact that we are seeing this wave really gain some momentum. Right now, we're seeing it spread to the largest banks here in the US.

BRAD SMITH: Yeah. The year of labor negotiations or collective bargaining, and we've seen it across as we were just talking about Hollywood. We've seen it already across the autoworkers and in health care as well too. That was significant and went under the radar in some instances because of all of the overlaps that we had seen in this kind of Gantt chart of different labor kind of negotiations that were taking place.

But ultimately here within the financial services industry, some of these workers saying that they're understaffed, that they're underpaid, that they're mismanaged. I would also add here that perhaps these workers are also getting a sense that at a lot of the branches, regional branches are being restructured vastly. Less square footage. Less employees necessary. However, the services are becoming more digitized.

So what is the best way that they can look to, at least perhaps in this perception and these moves that we've seen, to solidify their employment, is to unionize and make sure that ultimately they're not replaced but also kind of still a tandem hand or tandem voice that is a part of this broader financial services industry, regardless of the changes that may be made at a branch level as well.

SEANA SMITH: Yeah. And it's also important to point out that this vote is just the first step. They still need to negotiate on what an agreement will look like, a collective bargaining agreement, which is the contract here between the employees and the company in terms of what the terms of their employment is going to look like going forward. But like we said, this is just the latest. When you take into account what has happened at Starbucks, what has happened at some Apple stores, what has happened at some Amazon warehouses here over the last several months. So these workers really trying to capitalize on this movement.

BRAD SMITH: Absolutely.