Workers are Essential to the Process of Reforming Wells Fargo

Bank workers spoke out within their banks and in public to expose how high pressure sales tactics led to the opening of 2 million fraudulent accounts for customers, and how these metrics created an abusive and exploitative environment for employees. Ultimately, this advocacy led state and federal agencies to intervene and levy hundreds of million of dollars in fines against the bank. Yet, in seeking to remedy these problems, Wells Fargo is exhibiting the same top-down decision-making and disregard for the workers’ collective concerns and proposals that created the toxic sales environment in the first place.

When Wells Fargo released its 2017 Performance Management plan, workers with the Committee for Better Banks celebrated that management had adopted many of the CBB’s longstanding demands and those from the detailed November platform. Ending sales goals, basing incentives on customer service, focusing on team metrics, and capping incentive pay have been rallying cries for years. Still, while ending sales goals on paper has had a positive impact, sales pressure still exists in many workplaces. To understand what’s happening on the frontline and remedy the toxic culture at Wells Fargo, executives must engage workers, as partners, in a collaborative and transparent process of reform.

Some call center workers have “go home goals”. This means that if they sell enough credit cards they can go home for the day. In other parts of the country, some bankers must report their activities and the outcomes each week even though this violates bank policy. Furthermore, in other areas of the company, such as the mortgage department, workers still have sales goals.

In addition to these blatant examples of continuing pressure, we are concerned about the lack of details in the new compensation plans and how they could change over time. Will we be pushed to increase household relationship balance growth, loan volume, and referred investment assets? Will household relationship balance growth and loan volume simply become sales goals by another name?

Metrics, if they exist, should be based on customer service. And customer service scores should not be a subject of discipline or termination. Teams (and their managers) that consistently show low customer service performance should receive additional training to build professional capacities aimed at risk management, quality of customer service, product knowledge, and shared responsibility between management and employees for customer satisfaction. Managers should be prohibited from posting individual customer service scores and from phoning, texting, or emailing workers about their customer service scores during non-work hours.

Wells Fargo also must fix its compensation structure to ensure that employees are compensated fairly for their work.  Frontline workers at Wells Fargo earn as little as $13.50 per hour. After executives recently raised wages for tellers, some supervisors with years of experience now make the same amount as tellers on their first day. Frontline workers should receive a base wage of at least $20 per hour, which should increase according to seniority and skill level. Furthermore, incentive compensation should not exceed 5% of overall compensation. While the main motivation for meeting sales goals was to avoid discipline and termination, workers also felt extreme pressure to meet goals in order to obtain incentive bonuses that they needed to make ends meet.

Forced arbitration agreements played a large role in creating a toxic culture at Wells Fargo by forcing workers and consumers into a secretive, private arbitration system when their legal rights were violated. These fine print agreements require workers to give up their right to a fair day in court as a condition of working at the bank. Recently, Wells Fargo announced that it would settle with customers impacted by fraudulent banking practices, rather than force them into arbitration. The bank should extend the same practice to workers and immediately suspend the use of forced arbitration in all banks.

The solution is representation--a formal channel for dialogue with the bank regarding key workplace issues that impact workers and the customers they serve. Frontline bank workers can play an essential role in identifying and exposing practices that potentially hurt customers and damage the bank’s reputation and business. The bank should immediately issue a public statement recognizing the rights of Wells Fargo workers to join together without fear of retaliation. Bank workers should be able to improve our working conditions  and work with customers to ensure that the highest ethical standards are met.