Kirby Lee via AP
Signs in English, Spanish, and Chinese warn Chase Bank customers about COVID-19 symptoms, March 24, 2020, in Monterey Park, California.
The public-health crisis from the coronavirus exposed and worsened an economic crisis that had been smoldering for years below the surface of favorable economic reports. The finance industry and its employees are responding to people who have lost their jobs, can’t pay their bills, and need to feed their families. Many people were accumulating debt to supplement insufficient wages well before the outbreak. While nurses and doctors are first responders to the public-health crisis, bank tellers and credit counselors are first responders to the economic crisis.
Working on the front lines of the finance industry is considered by many to be a good customer service job. A teller is paid more highly and receives more benefits than a cashier or restaurant server. However, this doesn’t mean that any of these professions are adequately compensated for labor that has only recently been acknowledged as “essential.” About 75 percent of bank tellers earn less than $15 per hour and 31 percent receive public welfare.
The industry’s responses to customers experiencing a financial crisis align with its profit-making mandate. Finance is not free, and profits are extracted through risk calculations that raise the costs of banking and dignified economic participation for women, black and brown peoples, and lower-income whites. Banks’ racialized discrimination in small-business lending and stimulus check garnishments are two examples. The dissonance between the finance industry’s profit mandate and their customers’ realities leaves the industry’s responses severely wanting. And people working on the front lines—predominantly black and brown women who aren’t paid nearly enough to risk their health for performing essential labor—are responsible for translating this dissonance and calming panicked customers.
With profit as its guide, the finance industry fails the people it employs on the front lines, the customers it professes to serve, and the society in which we all live.
We interviewed people working on the front lines of finance in March and April 2020, when the coronavirus was spreading across the United States. When we began our interviews, fewer than 100 people had died. By the time we ended, the death toll was approaching 60,000. Sixty-eight percent of the frontline bank workers we interviewed were women and 73 percent were black, Latino, and Asian. Over half were working directly with customers in branches around the country. We asked questions about how their bank was protecting employees and how they were serving customers.
As has been reported by frontline workers across numerous industries, banks’ employees felt like they were expendable—especially early on when the death toll was low, and personal protective equipment was scarce. Frontline employees were aware of their heightened risks from the very beginning of the outbreak. A teller expressed resentment that her bank wasn’t doing more to protect employees, especially “when … [the] higher-ups, they say, ‘You’re essential and we’re here for you,’” from the comfort of their home offices. At one branch, employees drove from store to store during lunch breaks trying to find gloves and disinfectant after the meager supplies sent by corporate headquarters ran out.
As for their jobs, frontline employees were trying to help customers deal with the unfolding economic crisis. But individual employees’ genuine concerns and their ability to help were systematically warped into predatory schemes by the industry’s profit mandate. Employees at one regional bank were making “care calls” to sell new lines of credit and to gather success stories the bank could use in its promotions. By and large, these employees found devastation that couldn’t be solved with a fee-based product. “[The person who answered the phone] said [the customer had] died, and they couldn’t even have a funeral because it was from COVID. And so they were just talking to the banker and crying for like an hour. The banker sent them flowers.”
Employees were also encouraging customers to use overdraft fees as small loans when they needed money. At one national bank, a credit counselor advised a distraught customer to overdraw her account whenever she needed to buy groceries and pay bills. The credit counselor thought it would be better to accumulate debt with the bank than with a payday lender. However, the customer would still be responsible for paying back this costly debt, since the bank wasn’t waiving fees. The bank could even eventually close her account due to frequent overdrafts and record her activities in databases like ChexSystems that enable banks to deny services to customers based on their account histories.
The finance industry’s private banks provide a necessary public service and must be publicly accountable.
With profit as its guide, the finance industry fails the people it employs on the front lines, the customers it professes to serve, and the society in which we all live. People’s financial circumstances will worsen as public-health and economic crises persist, further exacerbating the dissonance between what we need the industry to do—such as waive fees, halt collections, stop negative credit reporting, protect frontline employees, and raise their wages—and what the industry is designed to do. Bank regulators’ systemic deregulation as part of their pandemic response has not helped, leaving customers with few protections from potential abuse.
However, there are alternatives, like passing proposed legislation to waive overdraft fees and stop negative credit reporting. Another promising opportunity is to boldly re-envision banking and finance as a public good. Policymakers must not be swayed by false beliefs that the industry cannot or should not be forced to provide better services. The finance industry’s private banks provide a necessary public service and must be publicly accountable. The for-profit industry’s disastrous responses during a global pandemic should make the need for public banking crystal clear.
The author recognizes Seyoung Oh, Mikal Wheatley, Anna Wood, and Haotian Zheng of the University of Michigan School of Social Work for their assistance conducting interviews with the finance industry’s frontline employees.
