November 28, 2007

A new job category has been added to the 1.4 million-strong AFSCME family: Bank employee.

Some 500 tellers and other white-collar, non-supervisory employees of U.S. Bank in Milwaukee County, voted overwhelmingly to affiliate with Wisconsin Council 48. U.S. Bank is the sixth largest commercial bank in the United States, with headquarters in Minneapolis, Minn.

This is a first for AFSCME, nationwide, says Richard Abelson, the council’s executive director. The workforce, he points out, is employed entirely within the confines of Milwaukee County. For the past three decades, the employees were members of an independent association called the Bank Employees Union, also exclusive to the county.

“As the bank has gotten larger, and as they’ve demonstrated less and less respect for us as employees, we felt that it was time to look at our options,” says Hady Bricco, who works in the bank’s fraud-detection department and is now president of their new AFSCME local – chartered as 777 not because of its lucky connotation, but because they work in what is known locally as the “777 building.”

“We were approached as one of a handful of unions they were reaching out to,” says Abelson. “After a relatively short courtship, they decided on us. They’re obviously not a traditional group of workers that AFSCME would represent, but they fit nicely with our group, and we’re very excited to have them on board.”

“We knew we didn’t want to get swallowed up by another union, so we thought about affiliating,” says Bricco. “It’s strength in numbers. We look forward to having AFSCME with us at the bargaining table.”