Wells Fargo Workers Push to Bring A Union to the Banking Industry

Workers at Wells Fargo are organizing the first union at a major U.S. bank—in one of the least-organized industries in the country.

The first branch where workers won a union vote, in 2023, was in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Since then, workers have have voted to join the Communications Workers (CWA) at 29 more branches from Apopka, Florida, to Casper, Wyoming. So have 35 workers who review customer and employee complaints at the bank.

These workers, a total of 200, are a small fraction of Wells Fargo’s 217,000 employees. But their organizing represents the first formal union effort since the company’s founding in 1852. And their success is even more notable in an almost entirely non-union industry.

Over 3 million bank workers are union members globally. But in the U.S., home to the world’s largest financial sector, fewer than 1 percent of the nation’s 4.5 million financial industry workers belong to a union.

CWA launched the Committee for Better Banks a decade ago, with the goals of organizing bank workers and empowering them to assist regulators’ efforts to monitor the finance industry.

Since 2020, the union has succeeded in organizing several small regional banks. When 100 workers at California’s Beneficial State Bank ratified their first contract in 2021, it marked the first new collective bargaining agreement in the banking industry in 40 years. The contract raised wages, increased retirement contributions, and established just-cause protections against unfair discipline.

Wells Fargo, the third-largest U.S. bank, is a much bigger target. It has 4,000 branches and claims to serve 1 in 3 American households and 10 percent of small businesses. The company pulled in $10.4 billion in profit in the first half of 2025 alone.

SHORT-STAFFED

Wells Fargo workers say that staffing issues, low pay, and sales pressure are driving them to organize.

For Sabrina Perez, a banker who works with wealthy clients at Wells Fargo’s El Dorado branch in Albuquerque, short staffing was the top issue. Her bank was the first to unionize.

Perez, who has worked at Wells Fargo for 12 years, started at this branch in March 2020, right as the pandemic hit. Since then, she said, “we’ve been dealing with a decreased level of staffing that seems to be getting worse by the month.”

Short staffing means that bankers like Perez, who are responsible for opening accounts and dealing with more complex transactions, often have to pull double duty as tellers. The stress adds up. “You can lose your job over one bad check,” Perez said.

Workers at Perez’s branch pushed the bank to add more staff, but got no response. “Even my manager at the time had spent many months trying to lobby for additional staff and was told no,” she said. “Meanwhile, all of us were taking on that additional work and not getting paid for it—much less being paid sufficiently for the work we were already doing.”

In Casper, too, staffing was a problem, said Andy King, a…