Wells Fargo Workers Push to Bring A Union to the Banking Industry

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.

The first branch where workers won a union vote, in 2023, was in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Since then, workers have have voted to join the Communications Workers (CWA) at 29 more branches from Apopka, Florida, to Casper, Wyoming. So have 35 workers who review customer and employee complaints at the bank.

These workers, a total of 200, are a small fraction of Wells Fargo’s 217,000 employees. 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.

Over 3 million bank workers are union members globally. But in the U.S., home to the world’s largest financial sector, fewer than 1 percent of the nation’s 4.5 million financial industry workers belong to a union.

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 has succeeded in organizing several small regional banks. When 100 workers at California’s Beneficial State Bank ratified their first contract in 2021, it marked the first new collective bargaining agreement in the banking industry in 40 years. The contract raised wages, increased retirement contributions, and established just-cause protections against unfair discipline.

Wells Fargo, the third-largest U.S. bank, is a much bigger target. It has 4,000 branches and claims to serve 1 in 3 American households and 10 percent of small businesses. The company pulled in $10.4 billion in profit in the first half of 2025 alone.

SHORT-STAFFED

Wells Fargo workers say that staffing issues, low pay, and sales pressure are driving them to organize.

For Sabrina Perez, a banker who works with wealthy clients at Wells Fargo’s El Dorado branch in Albuquerque, short staffing was the top issue. Her bank was the first to unionize.

Perez, who has worked at Wells Fargo for 12 years, started at this branch in March 2020, right as the pandemic hit. Since then, she said, “we’ve been dealing with a decreased level of staffing that seems to be getting worse by the month.”

Short staffing means that bankers like Perez, who are responsible for opening accounts and dealing with more complex transactions, often have to pull double duty as tellers. The stress adds up. “You can lose your job over one bad check,” Perez said.

Workers at Perez’s branch pushed the bank to add more staff, but got no response. “Even my manager at the time had spent many months trying to lobby for additional staff and was told no,” she said. “Meanwhile, all of us were taking on that additional work and not getting paid for it—much less being paid sufficiently for the work we were already doing.”

In Casper, too, staffing was a problem, said Andy King, a personal banker at Wells Fargo there. He said that when he started in 2019, the branch had eight workers. By late 2024, it was down to five.

Since CEO Charlie Scharf took over in 2019, the company has cut more than 40,000 jobs. The company claims the Casper branch has enough workers—but King says that’s because Wells Fargo keeps increasing the amount of time customers are expected to wait. Workers across the country told the Committee for Better Banks that lines out the door are now routine.

Turnover is also a big issue. With five years’ experience, King was the longest tenured worker at his branch. King said the stress—combined with inadequate pay—is a big cause of turnover. “You’re dealing with customers who are on edge, already disgruntled, you’re dealing with people’s money,” said King. “You can have really tough days that take a toll mentally, and you don’t have enough staff to handle it.”

King’s branch voted to join CWA in September 2024. He was fired three months later. The union has filed an unfair labor practice charge alleging it was retaliation for his organizing. King is hopeful he will win his job back.

SELL, SELL, SELL!

Wells Fargo is still recovering from a major scandal a decade ago over high-pressure sales practices that resulted in the fraudulent opening of millions of accounts that customers had not asked for. The Committee for Better Banks helped bank workers come forward as whistleblowers and expose these fake accounts.

In 2018, as punishment, the Federal Reserve imposed billions of dollars in fines and put a $2 trillion cap on the bank’s assets. Since then, Wells Fargo has been forced to watch while the others of the “big four” U.S. megabanks—JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Citibank—grew substantially.

Wells Fargo’s asset cap was lifted in June. “Now I can start having more fun,” CEO Scharf told the Wall Street Journal.

Amer Dababneh, a banker in Havertown, Pennsylvania, has been with the company since 2014—two years before the “fake accounts” scandal. He said he tried to flag the problem internally. “I called HR and said, ‘The manager is pushing to tell people to open accounts where they don’t need it.’ They said you have to do what the manager is telling you.”

Now, Dababneh is worried that the bank’s old sales practices are returning. He’s not alone: 84 percent of branch workers surveyed for a Committee for Better Banks report released in April said they are worried that the toxic sales pressure is rising at Wells Fargo.

The report estimates that commission and incentive payments are almost as great a percentage of Wells Fargo workers’ pay as they were before the scandal. Workers can lose raises if they don’t push hard enough to get customers to open new accounts or credit cards.

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Dababneh says pay is a big reason he supports the union. “I hit a point where there was no advancement money-wise, with inflation eating up our paycheck and no increases,” he said.

MAIL FROM THE UNION

Despite his frustrations, Dababneh did not think about unionizing until he received a brochure in the mail from CWA in late 2023. What was unique was where he received the brochure—at the branch itself. Bank workers can receive mail at their branches—and managers can’t open it. So just before the union vote, CWA mailed information to workers at all 4,000 Wells Fargo branches.

Dababneh reached out to CWA when he heard that workers in New Mexico had won their election. He and his co-workers filed for an election in April 2024.

Immediately, his branch manager illegally threatened to end Dababneh’s flexible start time, which gives him time to drop his child off at school. In an NLRB settlement, the bank agreed to restore Dababneh’s start time and post a notice stating it would not retaliate against workers for forming a union.

As it has done at every other branch that has filed for election, Wells Fargo sent HR executives and other managers to Dababneh’s branch to hold one-on-one meetings with workers and try to intimidate them.

ANTI-UNION PLAYBOOK

Andy King had the same experience at his branch in Casper. After workers filed, Wells Fargo sent in “a bunch of high-powered HR executives who we’ve never seen again. They put up posters, they’d pull tellers into conference rooms and take them away from customers so they could drill anti-union information into their heads,” he said. “We had to turn away customers so that Wells Fargo executives could tell our tellers not to unionize.”

Last year, Wells Fargo created a new HR position to coordinate its anti-union campaign and hired Stan Sherrill, a former attorney at Littler Mendelson, the notorious anti-union law firm. The bank has also hired Littler itself, with Littler attorneys chairing management’s side in negotiations. Branch managers are coached to share identical anti-union messages in weekly staff meetings, and the company has set up an internal anti-union website.

Wells Fargo’s anti-union efforts so far have failed to intimidate workers out of voting union: CWA has won 29 out of 32 elections it has filed for. Workers at Dababneh’s branch voted to join Wells Fargo Workers United in May 2024.

But CWA organizers estimate the union would have won dozens more elections by now if the company was not interfering with workers’ right to organize.

Last week, 15 senators (14 Democrats, plus independent Bernie Sanders) sent a letter to Scharf demanding the bank stop union busting.

NOT JUST BRANCH WORKERS

Wells Fargo Workers United is one of several major CWA organizing efforts, including a big push among tech workers. Over 2,000 Microsoft video game workers have joined the union since 2022 under a neutrality agreement. At CWA’s August convention, members committed to a long-term project to organize the union’s core jurisdiction, the telecom industry—which was 60 percent union in 1980, and is now down to 15 percent. CWA currently has 367,000 members in sectors including telecom, media, airlines, manufacturing, and government.

The union’s Wells Fargo organizing goes beyond the company’s estimated 25,000 branch workers. The bank’s sprawling operation includes tens of thousands of call center workers, fraud investigators, loan processors, and tech workers who CWA is aiming to recruit to the union. That includes 15,000 workers in the “Wall Street of the South,” Charlotte, North Carolina, where the union has been doing focused outreach.

On July 15, CWA members rallied outside Wells Fargo’s Charlotte office, along with the AFL-CIO, UNITE HERE, and the United Auto Workers. Bank workers and CWA President Claude Cummings delivered a petition with 2,600 signatures demanding the company stop union busting and delaying bargaining.

Wells Fargo workers have elected a five-person national bargaining committee, although the company insists on bargaining for each branch individually.

“We know they are not going to uphold a different set of rules or benefits for each location—really they’re trying to buy themselves time,” said Perez, who is on the union’s national bargaining committee. “They want to discourage people from [organizing] by pointing to: look how long this is taking, the union hasn’t gotten a contract, the union can’t win you anything.

“But their reason for fighting isn’t as strong as ours,” she said. “We will last one day longer than they will.”

Workers at any financial institution can reach out to CWA and the Committee for Better Banks at betterbanks.org.