After Walmart and fast food, labor activists now targeting banks

A little over a year ago, Marques, 26, was living with his wife in Miami, working a good-paying, creative job at a production company, pursuing his passion. But when they decided to get a divorce, circumstances brought him back home to Newark. He said he's now making just a dollar more an hour than the landscaping jobs he worked as an undocumented kid in high school, after immigrating from Brazil with his family.

Now, he said he's got his papers and an associate's degree and works full-time, but he lives with his parents because he can't afford his own place.

"The saddest part about it is we work for an industry that makes billions and billions a year," he said, asking that we not publish the name of his bank for fear of retaliation.

Then, around a year ago, his kid sister, a local student organizer, told him a new movement was stirring.

Union-back organizers have successfully whipped up low-wage worker campaigns at Walmart, the fast food industry, airports and even the Pentagon. Now, advocates have turned their attention to the low-wage staff of America's most high-flying industry: banking. 

There are more than half a million bank tellers in America, and they earned an average of $11.99 an hour in 2012, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Last year, a U.C. Berkeley Labor Center analysis found that almost a third of bank tellers rely on public assistance, compared to 25 percent of the workforce as a whole, costing taxpayers nearly $900 million a year. 

In October, dozens of community organizers convened in Baltimore to plan strategy. Marques was one of 10 bank workers to attend.

"I heard the stories," he said of the other workers. "I'm not alone. It's something other people are going through."

On Monday, Marques was in the lobby of Wells Fargo in St. Paul, Minnesota, shoulder-to-shoulder with a handful of other low-wage bank workers and dozens of community advocates. It was one of the first labor actions of a new coalition of community groups called the Committee for Better Banks, backed by the union Communications Workers of America. The group "occupied" the lobby after bank executives refused to hear their demands.

"In an industry that boasts more than $100 billion in profits, we who actually serve the public should be able to pay our bills, send our kids to college, buy a home, and put money in savings," the committee declares on its website.

This weekend, the Committee for Better Banks formally launched its membership roll for bank workers. Eight have signed up so far, according to Erin Mahoney, an organizing coordinator at CWA.

"It's not a huge number, but these are the founding members," she told America Tonight, adding that thousands of other workers have expressed interest through petitions, social media and in-person meetings.

The low-wage banker campaign is in some ways Occupy Wall Street recast as a labor fight: People shouldn't just be protected from getting predatory financial products pushed on them; workers should be protected from needing to push them. 

Every social justice campaign since Occupy has been influenced by it, according to Roger Schwartz, an organizer at New Jersey Communities United, which is part of the Committee for Better Banks. But the organizers' strategy owes more to the union-funded worker movements that have rocked the worlds of fast food and retail over the last few years.

In this new playbook, organizers go into traditionally non-union industries, coordinate one-day media-blitzed actions, and try to embarrass some of America's biggest companies into giving their workers a raise. On Wednesday, labor groups are coordinating what they say is their largest ever low-wage worker protest, spanning 40 countries and more than 200 cities, united under the banner "Fight for 15."

After decades of waning labor power, this approach has won some decisive victories. Last year, President Obama signed an executive order raising the minimum wage for federal contract workers to $10.10 an hour, after a string of protests in Washington, D.C. In February, Walmart announced all workers would earn at least $9 an hour, giving 500,000 people a raise. Target and T.J. Maxx soon followed. And earlier this month, McDonald's announced a pay bump for 90,000 employees.

"We're planning the mass actions, the shaming of these corporations," said Schwartz. "But we also have a larger vision for transforming the industry of banking itself … localized, personalized, free of toxic products and the pressure to push them."

The hard part is recruiting the workers for the fight. For community organizers, the goal is always for the community to take charge of the battle. Marques has tried speaking with some of his co-workers about the campaign, but he feels like it'll need time.

"If I don't say something, no one else will," he said. "People are afraid of saying something."