Employees of a Lake Michigan Credit Union branch are preparing for a union organizing fight with upper management, part of what they hope will boost the momentum for organizing across the banking industry.
Members of the LMCU Workers Alliance notified executives of the $11.8 billion-asset institution in Caledonia, Michigan, of their intent to unionize with the Communications Workers of America in a
As part of the campaign, employees of LMCU's South Division Avenue branch in Wyoming, Michigan, filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board to organize an election and officially register with a national organization.
"We understand that we could very likely leave the credit union and find higher compensation in other companies and institutions. … However, we would rather continue building this great team at the South Division branch," according to the letter, which gave LMCU executives until Friday to voluntarily recognize the union and avoid an NLRB-officiated election.
Despite the rarity of campaigns for unionizing in the financial services industry, staffers with the $38 million-asset
Similar efforts have also reached the $1.9 trillion-asset Wells Fargo, where organizers say its fake-accounts scandal and "toxic" culture have prompted employees to discuss working conditions. All the while, executives have touted internal resources as the best solution.
"When our employees have concerns, we want to hear directly from those employees to understand their perspectives and determine how we can work together to improve our workplace," the company said in an emailed statement, pointing to managers, the employee relations team and its confidential EthicsLine call center as resources for workers.
While unionization efforts at LMCU began in earnest at the beginning of this year, staffers remarked that problems with pay rates and paid time-off allowances at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 first fueled the prospect of organizing.
Employees at the branch were granted a special pay rate — nearly doubling their hourly wages — at the start of quarantine, but were surprised when the adjustment lapsed nearly 10 days later, said Ivan Diaz, a member service representative who has been with the credit union for roughly five years and an integral member of the alliance.
Staff members "who quarantined per company policy were using their paid time off," and "testing back then wasn't like it is today," Diaz said. "It would take anywhere from a few days up to a week for someone to get their results back," exhausting their time-off balances by the time they found out whether they had COVID-19.
But despite the efforts of branch managers advocating on behalf of Diaz and his colleagues, significant change was not possible through the normal channels, he said.
"While we've been following the chain of command as best as we can … it's gotten to the point where even our district manager has said that a lot of the decisions are made above them by the upper levels of management," Diaz said. "It's essentially a case of we're working on it, we're working on it, but not nearly enough gets changed or accomplished."
Employee burnout and stagnant wages have remained chief complaints of the group since then, but underappreciation of the credit union's bilingual staffers is one of its main grievances.
Anaisa Sanchez, a teller at the branch and a member of the alliance who speaks Spanish and English, explained how she and her multilingual colleagues are often pulled away from their daily tasks involving members who aren't well versed in English to serve as translators for co-workers in other departments.
"We have tellers that have lines just for themselves because people come and they want to see them specifically, and to have [people from] different departments contact us from the opposite side of Michigan because they need somebody to help them interpret … we aren't being recognized for that," Sanchez said.
The group recruited the aid of Nick Weiner, co-director of the Committee for Better Banks campaign founded by the CWA, who organized informational meetings with interested staffers to educate them on their rights and the challenges they would face throughout the process.
"People get mad at their company, but people don't organize unions because they hate their job even if they may be stressed out and miserable. … They actually want to love their job, and so they organize a union so they can fulfill their dream about the job that they do," Weiner said.
Experts on the history of the U.S. labor industry have cited dynamic shifts in workplaces across the country among a list of factors that contribute to a nationwide push for increased advocacy in workers' rights.
Ileen DeVault, a professor of labor history at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, explained how the cultivation of a more relaxed workplace environment during the pandemic and a recent trend of unionizing across multiple industries had led to a spike in campaigns.
"If you look at the groups that are organizing right now, whether it's tech workers or Starbucks, baristas or retail employees, they tend to be young workers. … It's a way of taking inspiration from groups that have already started to organize unions," DeVault said. "It inspires young people in particular to say, 'Well, why can't I do this at my workplace?' "
As LMCU staffers continue their crusade for change, the alliance hopes to spur similar progress at the credit union's other branches and beyond.
"Moving forward with this, hopefully, is like an inspiration for somebody else to maybe want to speak up and want to fix something that's going on in their work environment. … Not just in a financial setting, but in any way," Sanchez said.
