American Banker - April 9, 2015, by Kevin Wack - The nation's largest banks are again under attack — this time over how they treat their own rank-and-file employees. 

A coalition called the Committee for Better Banks, which includes unions and community groups, is planning protests Monday outside big-bank offices in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn.  The organizers are marrying long-standing complaints about the impact of bank practices in low-income neighborhoods and the large salaries of top executives with newer gripes about the banks' treatment of their own tellers and sales representatives.  The central message is that the country's biggest banks should be paying higher wages, offering better benefits, and eliminating aggressive sales goals that can create stress for lower-pay employees.  "While the financial industry has recovered in a big way since the crash — it's really come back strong — frontline workers have not experienced that," said Aditi Sen, a research analyst at the Center for Popular Democracy, an advocacy organization that released a report Thursday in connection with the upcoming protests.

In May 2014, the annual mean wage for tellers at depository institutions was $26,720, or $12.84 per hour, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

It's not clear whether the upcoming protests will include a substantial number of bank employees. Erin Mahoney, a spokeswoman for the coalition, said in an email that "thousands of bank workers have been engaging with us" using petitions and other methods.

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