Chase's Work Force: Where Have all the Tellers Gone?
Lewin, Janis
A job in a bank was once considered a job with a future, each teller a potential bank executive. Today the promise of a career in banking is nonexistent for most bank workers, who labor under...
...Strategy Against Organizing According to a bank employee, Chase grades sections of its work force each year on individual merit to determine wage raises...
...8 Chase's hiring programs, though accompanied by a great deal of publicity to the contrary, were ultimately frustrating for the people involved...
...The NLRB is just one mechanism within the state apparatus that functions to keep the contradiction between capital and labor from developing into a higher level of class struggle...
...2 The fact that the women were not competing with each other for the few positions available, but chose instead to organize themselves against the bank, distinguishes theirs from a highly competitive managerial struggle...
...The work itself has become a repetitive pattern...
...Ibid...
...The expanding financial industry now requires a much greater division of labor within its huge clerical work force to meet the demands of the increasingly complicated structures of monopoly capitalism...
...The resulting inefficiency has added to the current crisis of confidence in Chase, and has even led to the loss of customers...
...today, many are not tellers, but clerks who rarely deal with the public at all...
...employees are women...
...2 ' In January, 1976, ten women at Chase got together and filed a class action suit against their employer, on behalf of the bank's more than 10,000 women workers...
...We have to keep working," he says...
...To see herself as a future banker would be a sad self-delusion for today's back-office bank clerk...
...the rest of the body is frozen...
...The modern bank clerk has become subject to standards set by management, with less control over the work process...
...An industry-wide Electronic Funds Transfer System (EFTS) offers the prospect of an increase in long-term profits when "hundreds of thousands of paper shufflers can be dispensed with...
...Nine of the fourteen who brought the suit were fired, and soon after the 1969 settlement three more resigned...
...Early in 1973, the big bankers, through the Federal Reserve System, began a public push for "the development of a vast nationwide network of computers"' to facilitate the transfer of money among people and banks...
...Third World women, a traditional reserve of low-wage labor, have been brought into this sector...
...You don't really see the check," another encoder says...
...3. Studs Terkel, Working (New York: Avon Books, 1974), p. 350...
...Today the promise of a career in banking is nonexistent for most bank workers, who labor under conditions not unlike those of factory workers...
...Sullivan claimed, in the summer of 1975, that Chase had big plans for re-organizing operations and further tightening the work process...
...Although "liberated" from the cage to use the centrally located machines, the teller labors under conditions that have in fact become more restrictive than ever...
...The Board clarified the bargaining unit definition for bank workers in the 1973 Bank of America case...
...Chase is well aware of increasing discontent within its labor force and has taken numerous measures, in addition to those already described, to head off worker unrest and make the employees feel like members of "the Chase family...
...Aside from the threat of damaging and costly suits by special groups of workers, management senses the deeper danger of all the workers organizing in a union to press their interests...
...2 Limited to rubber-stamping and button-punching, one bank teller comments, I think a lot of places don't want people to be people...
...Attached to mechanical and electronic equipment, these employees have been transformed into checkout clerks at a money supermarket counter, their labor power purchased at the * By 1975, Chase was processing 2 million checks, and more than 5,600 security transfers every day...
...DIVISION OF LABOR AND ALIENATION The development of a division of labor that delegates specialized and routine tasks to different sectors of the banking work force has accelerated the dehumanization of bank clerical work, and re-ordered social relations within the bank...
...For example, Chase has 72 branches in Manhattan alone and 182 in the city's five boroughs...
...Citibank, for example, subjects its employees to competitive standards that rival the most demanding assembly plant...
...Your fingers feel it...
...WSJ, January 2, 1975...
...Each grade is worth a certain number of points and the total number determines the raise...
...They charged the Chase Manhattan Corporation with sexual discrimination in hiring and recruitment practices, and with using termination as a means of dealing with complaints...
...The new division of labor created by this technological development has produced a de-skilled clerical work force, each worker expendable, like the unskilled or semi-skilled factory worker...
...This makes it extremely difficult to organize...
...As Harry Braverman, a leading analyst of the changing role of labor in the U.S...
...In some cases a worker who has gone through the proper, and theoretically confidential, grievance procedure within the25 bank, has found herself (or himself) the subject of a bad "report card," regardless of actual performance...
...As the nature of bank clerical work is becoming increasingly oppressive the workldng class identity of these workers is more obvious, and class24 consciousness is growing...
...A reporter observes, One of the fastest encoders is a young man of Chinese descent...
...s The changing status and evolving processes of bank clerical work have been developing hand in hand with changes in the structure of the entire labor pool...
...There is still a great deal of duplication and overlap at the bank...
...The American Banker, August 22, 1973...
...7. San Francisco Chronicle, March 2, 1976...
...Eventually, as their class consciousness develops, bank clerical workers will no longer be politically divided from the rest of the proletariat...
...If volume drops off, you can't cut off a piece of the computer...
...NYT, March 15, 1970...
...His secret is to minimize movement: Two fingers tweeze each check and drop it into a slot...
...In 1963 only 8 percent of Chase's domestic staff was Third World, but by 1974 it had grown to 32 percent...
...lowest rates in the mass labor market, their activities prescribed, checked and controlled in such a way that they have become so many interchangeable parts...
...The Bank is the official trustee of these funds, and at the end of 1975, the Plan owned 426,000 shares of Chase stock, second only to the huge block controlled by David Rockefeller.s' In addition, by investing the workers' savings in shares of its own stock, Chase puts its employees in a position of potentially hurting their own interests if they should decide to make demands which would cut the bank's earnings, or lower the market value of the bank's stock...
...While this situation gives the bank clerical workers less bargaining power than, for example, highly skilled craft workers, at the same time it increases their consciousness of shared oppression...
...Administrative Reports...
...The other hand flies over the keys as | Where Have A -- v ....-- mm v NoN23 the eyes dart from check to check...
...It doesn't go through your brain...
...7 Electronic tellers, operated without human aid, perform many tasks...
...If I automate the way I want to, there won't be any left...
...Within these vast factories of financial paperwork, the lack of power to determine working conditions on the part of the clerical staff becomes increasingly obvious...
...The Wall Street Journal noted approvingly that "manufacturers and bankers and customers [are] all pleased...
...NACLA interview with Chase employee, February 17, 1976...
...5 This whole check-processing system is actually a relatively new addition to the technology of financial paperwork...
...Chase realized that unless the rage in the black communities was somehow defused, the political situation there would become more volatile...
...Frequently held by men, teller and clerk jobs were often stepping stones to managerial positions...
...Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Social and Economic Statistics...
...economy describes it, We may note the changes in the work of the bank teller, once an important functionary upon whose honesty, judgment and personality much of the public operations and relations of the bank used to depend...
...WSJ, January 17...
...3 s Conclusion Bank workers play a vital role in the economy...
...The Magazine of Bank Administration, op...
...Handbook of Labor Statistics 1974, U.S...
...A bargaining unit for bank employees includes all the workers of a bank that have some kind of business interaction...
...Management rarely moves up from the ranks these days, but instead is recruited directly from schools of business administration, and the myth of advancement possibilities for bank clerical workers is exploded...
...Over half the total domestic staff is female, and Chase boasts about its 32 percent minority representation's Throughout the bank, however, women and Third World people have consistently been confined to office and clerical categories while the bank nurtures a public image of being "socially responsible...
...Currently not even one percent of the one million bank employees in this country are organized...
...As stated in the Plan's Prospectus, The fundamental objectives of the plan are to provide an incentive to employees of the Bank [andl to reduce expenses and increase income, since participants in the Plan may benefit from increases in Ibank] profits...
...Chase...
...Shortchanged: Minorities and Women in Banking, op...
...NYT, January 17, 1968...
...bank workers, led primarily by the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU), has been a difficult one...
...Aside from attempting to defuse racial and political rebellion, this recruiting and training process reflects the changing nature of the labor minarket itself...
...the arm never moves...
...In June 1975, an operations officer at Citibank remarked, "I have 130 people...
...The Board administers labor laws, and makes interpretive rulings around such issues as unfair labor practices and certification of union representation...
...By 1966 this program was three-fourths black and Puerto Rican...
...They push us hard...
...The early image of the bank worker as semi-professional and upwardly mobile is fast disappearing, and as it does, petit bourgeois ideology and anti-working class ideas will necessarily diminish...
...Ibid...
...NACLA interview with NLRB official...
...The few exceptions tend to be highly educated, upper middle-class black men, who are placed in high visibility positions, such as an assistant manager of a community branch, granting mortgages to minorities.' 4 Chase's "altruistic" motives behind its minority recruitment are unmasked by its own admission in its 1971 Annual Report: This 32 percent representation [of minorities in the bank's labor force] derives as much from compulsion as compassion: any New York based organization that wants to man its desks and phones and computers must rely on the available labor pool, and in New York, as in most urban centers, the nature of that pool has drastically changed...
...The Chase Manhattan Corporation Annual Report 1971, p. 22...
...Shortchanged: Minorities and Women in Banking, The Council on Economic Priorities, 1972, p. 82...
...Chase recently installed a fully automatic branch in Grand Central Terminal in New York City...
...A supposedly objective review, one of its main functions is actually to isolate and eliminate undesirables...
...A 1971 study by the independent Council on Economic Priorities reveals that these employees are almost entirely contained in an upwardly immobile, low-level clerical sector...
...But wages remain extremely low, and in spite of the yellow shopping bag proclaiming ESP as "The Inflation Fighter," the economic crisis is not so easily resolved," 2 and neither will workers be so easily distracted from the real reasons behind their own situation...
...Calling themselves WE-ACT (Women for Equality at Chase Today), the group is demanding "lost wages" and new hiring and advancement procedures...
...69-73...
...They push us...
...Rockefeller, hardly the self-made man, cites individual initiative as the primary driving force behind "better jobs and higher salaries...
...This encoder makes $15,000 a year, averaging 2,000 checks an hour...
...Cooptation Strategy and Recruitment Chase's labor force totals approximately 27,000 workers, with 20,000 employed domestically...
...Forbes, op...
...2. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), p. 340...
...He went on to describe "a significant and heartening change of attitude on the part of many businessmen as to what constitutes their social responsibility...
...This new department was in reality established as a mechanism for isolating any potential troublemakers, rather than to change discriminatory practices within the bank...
...cit., p. 17...
...Conditions thus appear to be ripening for the widespread organizing of bank workers despite the obstacles placed in the path by capital and its ally, the state...
...In 1969 Chase implemented the federally funded Job Opportunities in the Business Sector (JOBS) program for the "disadvantaged," to offer a future "opportunity" to otherwise deprived young male dropouts.' 7 The jobs these young men are trained for are tedious, routine, and carry a decidedly low status...
...Journal of Commerce, January 15, 1976: 28...
...Barry Sullivan was brought in as an executive vice-president for operations and within two years he had streamlined the staff from 10,000 to 8,000.10 Yet Chase has been slow in centralizing operational procedures, particularly when compared with its rival, Citibank...
...The Plan actually serves several functions...
...4. Forbes, July 1, 1975, "The Operations Man," p. 99...
...cit., p. 81...
...The Magazine of Bank Administration, May 1973, p. 16...
...3 2 One of the main roadblocks to the organization of bank workers has been a series of rulings by the National Labor Relations Board.* The NLRB, an agency supposedly set up for the benefit of labor, has actually been used to defuse workers' struggles...
...The Chase Manhattan Corporation Annual Report 1974, p. 7. 14...
...This article will discuss the development of the bank clerical work force, focusing on the workers at Chase...
...6. New York Times (NYT), January 2, 1973...
...Chase, for example, employs 8,000 people in its giant check and data-processing operations headquarters.' (see below) In any particular branch, the back-office staff takes over where the teller leaves off, feeding the information of the initial transactions to the data-processing machines...
...3 The design of the Plan gives the dominant interests within the bank (which administer the fund) control over a large bloc of the bank's stock, since a significant portion of the funds are invested in Chase's own stock...
...3 Of the 700,000 bank clerical workers in the U.S...
...One of these tactical programs is the company store...
...Chase refuses to divulge the job distribution of women and Third World workers within the bank for good reason...
...But in the last few years the degree of responsibility and ability to take initiative has plummeted, and 80 percent of bank clerical work is now done by women.' After the initial transaction with the customer, the teller deals only with the first stage of recording the information...
...Chase took the lead in 1962 with its Business Experience Training (B.E.T...
...Securities and Exchange Commission files, Washington, D.C...
...The operations described above were done entirely by hand only a dozen years ago, and the seventies promise even further automation...
...see also "Chase and the Black Struggle") Consequently, the bank implemented a conscious policy of recruiting black and Puerto Rican workers...
...You don't really read the number...
...The bank set up a "staff development department" to handle future grievances, and the Commission agreed to this arrangement...
...This mechanization has helped clarify the class position of these "white-collar" employees as members of the working class...
...ORGANIZING IN BANKS The struggle to organize U.S...
...NYT, July 10, 1969...
...NYT, November 28, 1967...
...As noted by the IVall Street Journal, "many a white middle-class high school graduate who once saw respectability in the teller's cage now goes to college instead...
...On one level the bank management keeps a sharp lookout for potential organizers, and moves quickly to derail their efforts...
...Consisting of three free-standing electronic machines, this branch cashes checks, accepts deposits, and even gives out loans, all without any human assistance...
...Management can make more demands on the workers, like speedups, and will threaten to lay off those who do not meet those standards...
...A graduate of the acclaimed JOBS program complained, "I feel like I'm in a box...
...2 2 But his exasperation with those "who have only the vaguest notion of what constitutes punctuality and proper attire . . . who suffer from an almost total lack of motivation,"2 echoes the racism inherent in the bourgeois notion that with the correct attitude, anyone can be an achiever...
...a Chase client cannot get a comprehensive and up-to-date computer print-out regarding his business in various departments...
...Of course, you can lay off a section of your labor force...
...5. Wall Street Journal (WSJ), June 6, 1975...
...Afros and suede jerkins are the style...
...Another program is the carefully designed Thrift-Incentive Plan, which allows Chase employees to contribute up to 10 percent of their salary into one of five different funds managed by the bank...
...By absorbing some Third World people into the economy, Chase realized it and other major banks and corporations could help diminish the potential for violent explosions...
...8. WSJ, September 6, 1972...
...The financial system under monopoly capitalism requires an expanding work force, and an increasing mechanization of its processes...
...The mouth hangs slightly open...
...Some of them operate computers and adding machines in individual branches, and others work in the vast check-processing and computer-centers run by the large banks...
...Ninety percent of all the women and 96 percent of the minority women working at Chase in 1971 were doing office and clerical work...
...8 Employees, not mentioned in the article, are not so delighted...
...They just want to dehumanize you...
...Following examples set by other New York banks, Chase established a "bargain basement" general store for members of the Chase Employees' Club...
...On another level, the bank has instituted a number of programs to give the workers a sense that the Chase management looks out for their interests and thus, that a union is not only unnecessary but, in fact, might lead to a loss of benefits...
...that is, a branch cannot be considered "locally autonomous" if employees are ever transferred from that branch to another.3 The interpretation of the NLRB ruling most favored by management is that one bargaining unit would be composed of all the workers at all the branches of a bank in a given city...
...Proud of its trailblazing role in job training programs (Chase adopted an Affirmative Action program in 1964), the bank can be credited with a farsighted outlook regarding its position in a politically explosive community...
...Ninety percent of Third World workers at Chase in 1971 were in office and clerical departments...
...NYT, December 27, 1966;NYT, July 14, 1968...
...CHASE'S WORK FORCE 1. U.S...
...We can't afford to take a coffee break...
...In addition to promoting the image of a caring and benevolent institution with the workers' interests and security at heart, it acts as an incentive system...
...Ibid...
...But the work is less than enjoyable...
...9. WSJ, June 6, 1975...
...1968...
...In spite of the problems, the growing class consciousness of bank clerical workers has helped create conditions favorable to organizing...
...Ibid...
...Influenced by the women's movement, the ten realized that women are systematically oppressed at the bank...
...Created during the economic crunch in 1974, the Employee Store and Pharmacy (ESP) does take some of the pressure off the workers...
...without them no corporate transaction would be completed, and capital could not circulate...
...Prospectus, The Chase Manhattan Employees' Benefit Program Thrift-.Incentive Plan, May 16, 1975...
...The National Labor Relations Board, set up in 1935 under the jurisdiction of the Wagner Act, was the Federal government's response to labor demands of the thirties...
...WSJ, December 23, 1969...
...The employee is informed that everything possible will be done, but if no new position is found, or the request is answered with an obviously unsatisfactory solution, the worker is fired...
...19 The earlier notion of a bank job as a stepping stone to a banking career has proven bankrupt, and the class divisions, already sharpened through the hierarchy and forms of bank clerical work itself, now become even more distinct along racial lines...
...Sullivan noted that, "When you replace people with a computer, you also raise your break-even point...
...NACLA interview with Chase employee, February 17, 1976...
...Chase, still resistant to complete reliance on automation, recognizes some of the long-term problems involved...
...program for "potential" high school dropouts...
...The roots of that sexism, however, lie not with Chase policymakers, but in the capitalist system of which the bank is such a vital part...
...Any illusions of prestige or "white-collar" status disappear even more quickly at the giant headquarters, check-processing and computer-centers run by the large banks...
...A $5 million dollar program scheduled to run through 1976 will set "cost standards, control standards and service standards all at the same time...
...Though William H. Booth, chairman of the City Commission on Human Rights, ruled that there was "probable cause" for hearings regarding the charge, the legal confrontation never occurred...
...As more electronic devices are introduced into banking, the skills required to run the bank become more specialized, and at the same time more simplified, dealing repeatedly with one aspect of the entire operation...
...In 1958, when 33 percent of white working women were doing clerical work, only 7 percent of non-white women held jobs in that sector...
...Subject: Occupation by Industry, 1970...
...By 1973, the percentage of employed white women doing clerical work was virtually the same (35 percent), but the percentage of minority women in clerical labor had jumped to 24 percent.' 6 The ruling class' political strategy of co-optation of minorities, as well as labor needs, led to the establishment of recruiting programs...
...These changes foster the development of a division of labor that clarifies the exploitative character of the relationship of this sector of the proletariat to capital...
...Only 3 percent of the Third World employees were officers or managerial staff, and of that group almost all were male.20 In 1967, fourteen black computer operators charged Chase with discrimination in job training and confinement to low responsibility, low-rank job capacities...
...Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Table 19, pp...
...Only about 20 banks are unionized, and these are all small, with the exception of Seattle-First National Bank, the state of Washington's largest bank (126 branches...
...A department supervisor fills out a standardized form with boxes ranging from poor to excellent in response to questions about different aspects of the job...
...2 1 Testifying before the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission in January, 1968, David Rockefeller claimed that accusations of racism directed at his and other banks were unfair...
...Long gone is the day when personnel managers could expect to fill clerical vacancies with demurely dressed blonde high school graduates...
...The Magazine of Bank Administration recognizes this threat: As jobs become deskilled and promotion opportunities vanish, clerical employees come to see themselves as a class apart from management, a class working at unsatisfactory jobs and a class which might relieve its common frustration by unionizing.3 During an organizing campaign at the First National Bank and Trust Company in Washington, Pennsylvania, bank officer W. C. Powers remarked, "When they start to identify with office workers per se and not with the bank, that is when they are susceptible to union talk, and the union finds this weakness...
...I can go all the way around but never up...
...The volumes of paper processed daily by today's big banks* have led to the introduction of extensive computer technology and have created this stratification within the ranks...
...This review has been used as a weapon against those who have dared to file a grievance, thus effectively stifling complaint...
...In 1970 things were so bad that "our volume was rising seven percent a year and our costs were going up fifteen percent a year...
...These jobs were traditionally low-paying, in spite of the level of responsibility and the accompanying petit bourgeois ideology...
...You sense it...
...The old-fashioned home-town bank teller would spend the day in a "cage," dealing with numerous aspects of each customer's banking business...
...CHASE'S OWN LABOR FORCE Tightening the Belt In addition to opening branches without employees, Chase has been making efforts to cut down on its existing labor force...
...I think they want you to almost be the machines they're working with...
...In addition, if a worker requests a transfer, Chase often interprets this as a sign of chronic dissatisfaction...
...The problem is compounded since large banks use many part-time workers on staggered shifts, who have little contact with one another, yet are part of the same bargaining unit...
...2 His own salary, excluding expense accounts, tax breaks, and other benefits, approaches $300,000 a year, while the average bank worker makes less than $7000.1 Women at Chase Over half of Chase's 20,000 U.S...
...WSJ, December 23, 1969...
...The mechanization of the office or bank has produced a more bored and alienated work force, and solidified the hierarchy of authority...
Vol. 10 • April 1976 • No. 4
