Too Big Not To Organize
UNI Global Union 30 July 2010 09:48:10
The struggle of United States bank workers for union representation was featured yesterday in an article in the progressive news and opinion magazine "In These Times." In the article, reporter Mike Elk highlights the need for bank workers — many of whom work long hours without overtime to meet near-impossible quotas — to organise. He says cutting Wall Street executive bonuses could provide America's nearly 550,000 bank workers with a $2 an hour raise and fully employer-paid health insurance.
BOSTON—Through the blare of screeching feedback from portable translation headsets and microphones, unionized bank workers from Brazil, England, Chile, Germany, and Uruguay are encouraging American workers to undertake an unprecedented campaign against a common enemy: Grupo Santander, the global banking giant which last year took control of Sovereign Bank.
The largest bank in the Euro-zone, where it is based, Santander is the world’s eighth largest banking company by market capitalization. While the company is very good at generating profits around the world (it’s the world’s fourth largest bank by profits), this international meeting is focusing on something else: how the bank’s new U.S. branches might become as unionized as branches in Europe and Latin America.
Santander bank branches are on average 75-percent unionized outside the United States, according to UNI Global Union Finance Director Oliver Roethig because most other industrialized nations have unionized banking sectors. In the United States, however, less than 1 percent of all front-office bank workers are organized. In fact, the unionized janitors working for contractors that clean Sovereign Bank’s headquarters in Boston, Mass., often make more than the bank tellers and personal bankers, whose average wage is $10-$12 dollars per hour, despite individually producing millions of dollars in profits for the bank each year.
But the financial sector, at the center of the U.S. economy, has never been unionized. The international workers and local leaders of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and Communication Workers of America (CWA) gathered in July to use the clout of global union federations like the UNI Global Union to give labor a foothold in Santander’s Sovereign operations, and potentially organize the industry from there. If Santander employees are heavily unionized overseas, and corporate profits are so robust, then why shouldn’t American workers also join a union?
Read the full article at In These Times's website by clicking here,
The recent international meeting in Boston was also covered by the United Kingdom's Morning Star.
To read the Morning Star article, click here.
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