Inside Wells Fargo's struggle with worker safety during the pandemic

The last time Audrey Wagstaff saw her son alive was through a glass door.

Robert Wagstaff, 30, was a Wells Fargo mortgage call center employee known as BB. His mother arrived at Northeast Baptist hospital in San Antonio, Texas, on April 10, 2020, minutes before he passed away from coronavirus complications, she says.

“To have him in my life every single day, and then not to have him at all … Everyone says: ‘I can imagine your pain.’ I want to tell you right now: no, you can't,” says Audrey Wagstaff, 55.

BB’s death may have been avoidable, she says. Wagstaff alleges that her son, whom she had dropped off each morning at Wells Fargo for nearly four years, hadn’t been notified that someone else in his office had tested positive for coronavirus. If BB Wagstaff had known, he could have gotten tested or received medical attention sooner, she argues.

The death of BB Wagstaff is one piece of a larger picture illustrating how one of the largest U.S. banks battled the pandemic — and how a history of distrust between Wells Fargo and its employees may have contributed to dissension and fear among its ranks.

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At least 97 individuals have raised grievances with either federal or state Occupational Safety and Health Administration agencies, according to a database of closed OSHA complaints as well as additional cases obtained through FOIA requests, Financial Planning found. (Financial Planning is a sister publication of American Banker.)

OSHA’s federal database is not exhaustive — 45 of the Wells Fargo complaints Financial Planning found were mischaracterized or not mentioned in it, and a federal agency spokeswoman said it’s possible that some complaints were not included.

These documents spotlight the challenges coronavirus created for both banks and their workforces — and how it played out on the ground and across the company at Wells Fargo, an organization already working to rebuild confidence with its employees.

Wells garnered approximately 16% of OSHA complaints against banks between March 2020 and March 2021, according to OSHA’s federal database — relatively in line with the 13% of the banking workforce it employs. It received more than three times the complaints of any other commercial bank in the U.S. regarding employee safety during the pandemic. Wells Fargo is the largest banking employer in the U.S., with about 234,000 employees at March 31. (It has nearly 270,000 employees globally.)

Despite the employee complaints, Wells Fargo was found to be in compliance with safety rules. OSHA conducted two on-site inspections, a bank spokesperson said — and “no OSHA agency has taken adverse action against us, cited us, fined us, or sanctioned us in any way, nor has any OSHA agency notified us that any investigation is continuing.”

“We implemented safety practices with the health and safety of our employee s and customers as the highest priority and quickly responded throughout the pandemic to evolving science and guidance from health officials,” another Wells Fargo spokesman said.

Wells Fargo says it has taken extensive measures to protect its employees during the pandemic, including enhanced cleaning procedures, social distancing policies, nurses on-site and flexible time-off policies for COVID exposure or positive cases. That’s in addition to hundreds of millions of dollars in grants, expenses, and bonuses and raises for some of its employees. The bank scored top marks for safeguarding its branches for customers by a research firm that deployed mystery shoppers to various banks in July 2020.

Despite this, 97 OSHA complainants, a labor organization that has long battled the bank, and five current or former employees and family members contend that Wells Fargo — a bank regulators say has historically put high pressure on its employees — hasn’t done enough to defend workers from the virus. The OSHA complaints and interviews with employees offer a rare window into labor relations within a giant bank during this uncertain period.

A new world of work

“We've entered into a world we haven't seen before,” Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf said on April 14, 2020, on the company’s first earnings call since the coronavirus was proclaimed a pandemic.

Companies’ business continuity plans were put to the test as they strived to send employees home, all while trying to maintain operations. Some companies faced blistering criticism from employees and their family members who said their employers were not taking enough care to safeguard their health.

“OSHA has recognized, basically at the outset, that there have been challenges beyond the control of the employers,” says Darra James Coleman, an attorney at Nexsen Pruet, who represents companies facing labor complaints in South Carolina.

Federal and state OSHA plans received more than 67,000 complaints regarding coronavirus against employers between February 1, 2020 and May 16, 2021, according to public records.

The OSHA department in Oregon, alone, reviewed an outsized number of these complaints — approximately 23,000 coronavirus complaints during the pandemic, compared to the 2,000 complaints it typically receives each year, according to Aaron Corvin, Public Information Officer of Oregon’s Occupational Safety and Health division. Corvin credits “relatively intense media attention” during the pandemic and broad circulation of the state’s OSHA online hazard-reporting form as a major contributor to the high volume of complaints.

While OSHA scrutiny and public attention focused on front-line industries such as healthcare and first responders, bank employees also have reported alleged safety shortcomings at their employers to OSHA throughout the pandemic. Their complaints covered areas such as lack of social distancing, having to share unsanitized equipment with colleagues, and peers coming to work with coronavirus symptoms.

Oakley Denney, 22, had been working at Wells Fargo for about a year when she heard about the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the U.S. on NBC News, she says.

“I knew that it was going to be a big deal,” she says. “So I started taking precautions myself, like wearing a mask every day inside of the [Wells Fargo] building.”

Denney, who worked as a collections agent at Wells Fargo’s William Barhart center in Beaverton, Oregon, filed a complaint with OSHA on March 25, according to state records, alleging that employees were not practicing social distancing and stating that call center workers were still required to come into the office. She and some of her team members expressed concern with their manager over the same issues, she says.

Denney’s complaint was the second to be filed against Wells Fargo with OSHA during the pandemic, according to OSHA’s database, and it was one of at least 25 complaints the bank would address that were filed before the end of March particularly in Oregon, but also across Virginia, Iowa and Nevada.

At the time, Wells Fargo was working to reduce the number of employees coming into its offices, according to a company statement as well as emailed correspondence between Steven Colton, vice president of environmental risk and compliance at Wells Fargo, and OSHA investigators.

Employees at Wells Fargo call centers were considered essential, and were still required to come into work at the time. Some workers were afraid of falling ill and felt that supervisors were minimizing their concerns, according to interviews Vice conducted with 11 employees in March 2020.

The week of March 13, 2020, Wells Fargo had approximately 850 people coming into its Hillsboro, Oregon, call center, which normally seated 1,838, according to an email Colton sent to an OSHA enforcement manager. Two weeks later, it had reduced that number to 600.

Across its locations, Wells Fargo had implemented a social distancing policy, it said, staggering its seating assignments and work shifts. Colton wrote that Wells was instructing its employees to socially distance and its managers to enforce the policy.

But at the Beaverton site, “nothing was changing,” asserts Denney, who says she was still required to come into the office at the time. “They sent people to work from home, but they still had the building open and weren’t limiting the capacity.”

Ultimately, Denney quit her job a few months after filing the complaint with OSHA, saying she disapproved of the way Wells had handled the situation.

“I thought it was kind of greedy, and I didn’t want to work for a company like that,” she says.

“In general Wells Fargo was receptive and responsive — they were working to address the complaints and to head in the right direction,” Aaron Corvin, Public Information Officer of Oregon’s state OSHA department, said in an email.

The wave continues

When coronavirus began surging in March and cities began issuing stay-at-home orders, Wells Fargo was moving to send employees to work from home — which required rushing to get them equipment to do so.

“We have been working with technology companies to procure thousands of additional desktops, laptops and other equipment, including headsets, and our technology team is working to support connections from an increased number of remote employees,” wrote Colton to an OSHA enforcement manager on April 16, 2020.

By April 14, there were 180,000 employees working remotely, according to statements made by Scharf on a company earnings call. The company had temporarily closed about 1,400 — or one-fourth — of its U.S. branches by that date, Scharf told analysts on the call — but its contact centers were still open, he said.

The number of Wells Fargo employees globally working from home has since increased to 200,000, including 30,000 contact center employees, a level that will continue until at least early September 2021, according to a bank spokesperson.

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Records and Wells Fargo correspondence with OSHA officials document the bank hanging up social distancing signs, closing down cafeterias and introducing on-site nurses. The company also handed out COVID-related bonuses to 165,000 employees, gave a $25 million grant to an employee relief fund that financially helped more than 23,000 employees in 2020 and provided 200,000 safety kits with face coverings, thermometers and other supplies to employees, among other initiatives, according to a company spokesperson.

Between April and June 2020, Wells Fargo spent $382 million on personnel, occupancy and technology expenses related to COVID-19, and approximately $295 million of fee and interest waivers to accommodate customers in response to COVID-19. Those expenses contributed to the bank running at a net loss of $2.4 billion in the second quarter of 2020, company data shows.

Despite the bank’s aforementioned efforts, employees continued to file complaints with OSHA against Wells Fargo each month between March 2020 and 2021, save for September 2020, according to records. But a significant portion of the complaints — 42 — were filed in March and April 2020 — a time when many businesses were struggling to understand how to respond and when government guidance changed frequently.

While many of the complaints have centered around call centers, there have been grievances at individual branches as well.

For instance, Wells Fargo received six complaints between November 15 and 20, 2020, about a branch in Federal Way, Washington, which asserted that the building was crowded and social distancing rules were not being enforced, according to records.

“[The] district manager [is] more focused on having us help as many customers as possible to increase business profit and growth,” wrote one complainant, who was not identified.

In general, the complaints raised concerns over proximity to coworkers, inadequate contact tracing and, in some cases, cleanliness. More than a dozen of the complaints address coworkers in the building or branch being exposed to or testing positive for coronavirus.

The company countered that it acted appropriately.

When there is a positive test within Wells Fargo’s ranks, the bank contacts colleagues “known to have been in close contact with the individual,” and they are asked not to come into the office for 14 days, according to the Wells Fargo spokeswoman. Wells Fargo communicates with all other relevant employees and conducts a “comprehensive disinfection protocol, including in common areas,” to disinfect surfaces, including workstation desks, computers, keyboards, mice and phones.

“We reopen areas only after conferring with regional and local managers. All of our protocols have been established in accordance with public health guidance,” the spokeswoman said.

In a Wells Fargo branch in Chino, California, nine employees tested positive for coronavirus between July and December 2020, according to an email Colton sent to a California OSHA enforcement manager in response to a complaint.

Wells Fargo sent out a general notification for each of those positive cases, according to the email. Its contact tracing determined that “there were no employees in prolonged close contact with the individuals who tested positive,” so it didn’t instruct any other employees to self-quarantine, it says.

Other employee concerns have focused on the dangers of sharing desks and phones.

Alex Ross, a Wells Fargo auto finance loan documentation specialist in Minneapolis, told Financial Planning that, while desks were moved six feet apart in his office, he had been required to share a phone with about seven other colleagues. From the end of February to mid-April 2020, the employees allegedly didn’t have any supplies to disinfect the phone in between usage. (A Wells Fargo spokesman disputes this: “We have not needed to have auto funding employees that are in the office share phones or headsets during the pandemic.”)

“That was a big concern of ours,” says Ross, 41, who was transitioning into a new role at the company at the time. Ross says he co-signed a letter to management with other colleagues on April 24 asking that Wells Fargo lift the restriction requiring employees to work from the office during the first six months of a new position. His request wasn’t granted, and he continued to go into work, he says. (Wells Fargo says it updated its policy in January 2021, allowing all auto funding employees to work from home, regardless of how long they had been in their role, according to a company spokesman.)

Four OSHA complaints in Hillsboro, Oregon and Sacramento that were filed between March and October 2020 also allege individuals had to share phones or desks. Ross did not file a complaint with OSHA, he says.

Wells Fargo says it has thoroughly investigated every OSHA complaint and been compliant with agency requirements. Oregon OSHA’s Corvin said this isn’t atypical. His state experienced a “number of employers, across different industries” receiving many COVID complaints, even when they were doing “pretty well in terms of addressing COVID-19 hazards.”

An independent research firm, Ipsos, gave Wells Fargo the top score among financial services companies for implementing COVID-related signage at branches, as well as for cleanliness, according to the research company.

Approximately 96% of Wells Fargo locations mystery shoppers visited had signs requiring customers to wear masks, compared to the industry average of 87%, according to Ipsos. More shoppers observed surfaces being wiped down during their visit than at any other bank.

Employees who don’t trust management

If the company was in compliance with OSHA rules, why did some employees still feel scared to come to work?

It’s possible there may be a disconnect at Wells Fargo between its official coronavirus policies and the implementation at the manager level, according to Nick Weiner, co-director of the Committee for Better Banks. The Committee is a coalition of bank workers, community and consumer advocacy groups, and labor organizations that has publicly battled Wells Fargo over its alleged “toxic, high-pressure sales culture.”

Employees harbored mistrust of Wells Fargo long before the coronavirus pandemic began, according to Weiner.

Wells Fargo has faced repeated scandals since 2016, when it was fined by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for issuing credit cards without customer consent and setting up fake bank accounts dating back to 2011. Following this, there have been a series of regulatory allegations and investigations, including a $3 billion settlement with the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The settlement detailed patterns of wrongdoing at the bank dating back to 2002, including instances of fraud and identity theft, and the falsification of records.

Wells Fargo employees are sometimes wary of this history of regulatory and legal issues, as well as cases of retaliation against employees who have spoken out against misconduct, according to Weiner.

“When trust breaks down within an organization, it's hard to rebuild it,” Weiner says.

Ross, the employee in Minneapolis, who is a member of the Committee for Better Banks, says that in his time at the bank, he has never seen employee concerns be addressed when raised.

In surveys the Committee for Better Banks has conducted of its members to gauge COVID-related safety protocols, the chief concern employees raised was not being informed of positive cases in the office, he says. Wells Fargo employees, of whom about 600 belong to the Committee, have been the most likely to respond to the surveys of all the member banks’ workforces, according to Weiner.

“We haven't heard about a lot of positive cases from workers at other banks, so something's not right,” Weiner says.

In May and June of 2020, the Committee reviewed and graded U.S. banks on their initial response to COVID-19 in terms of lending, employee and customer safety. Wells Fargo was one of four banks to get an F.

A Wells Fargo spokesperson said that the Committee for Better Banks’ assessment is “biased and inaccurate” and stated that “nothing has been more important to us than the safety and well-being of our employees and customers” throughout the pandemic.

“There seems to be a lot of manager discretion on implementing policies,” Weiner says, citing employee survey responses. On the other hand, there’s a “very rigid bureaucracy” that won’t approve things that appear to be common sense, he says.

Reina Abrahamson, a Wells Fargo employee in Salem, Oregon, and Committee for Better Banks member, says she struggled to get an ethernet cable so that she could work from home, because she needed one that was longer than the standard cords being issued.

“It took them six months to approve my supervisor to purchase [it],” says Abrahamson, 33. Abrahamson has been on paid leave since the beginning of the pandemic due to underlying health conditions and an inability to work from home, she says.

“We understand the challenges that many of our employees have faced during the pandemic and will continue to provide enhanced benefits and support,” said a Wells Fargo spokesperson, declining to comment on Abrahamson’s experience specifically.

Ongoing layoffs, tied to the bank's broader cost-cutting measures, have also put the employees on edge, according to Weiner, who says “it impacts all the employees’ outlook.”

No playbook

Wagstaff says she visits the cemetery each Monday to spend time at her son’s grave and tell him what’s going on in the world. She has been attending a support group for those who have lost loved ones to the virus.

“There is help out there,” Wagstaff says.

For Wells Fargo, the pandemic hit just as it was working to rebuild the faith of employees, customers and regulators in the bank.

“We have not yet re-earned the trust that we would like the Wells Fargo name to represent,” Scharf told the House Financial Services committee on March 10, 2020, adding later: “I absolutely believe that we can restore the brand and reputation of Wells Fargo.”