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The Bank Employees Who Make Less Than $15 An Hour

CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK
CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK

Getting a job in banking is often lucrative. Someone who works as a financial analyst can expect a median salary of nearly $77,000 a year. Someone selling financial products will make nearly $72,000 a year at the median.

But the majority of people who work for banks in fact make far less. The most common occupation is bank teller, and nearly three-quarters of them make less than $15 an hour, according to an analysis from the National Employment Law Project (NELP) provided exclusively to ThinkProgress.

Nearly a half million people work as bank tellers. Their median hourly wage is just $12.44, and 74.1 percent make less than $15. Worse, their real wages have actually fallen over the past five years as the cost of living has risen, decreasing 3.4 percent between 2009 and 2014.

They’re not the only bank employees making low wages. More than 40 percent of customer service representatives make less than $15 an hour, as does a quarter of the people in banking who work in maintenance, protective service, and production.

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The NELP report notes that bank tellers are overwhelmingly female — women make up nearly 85 percent of the bank teller workforce — and are also disproportionately Latino. Latinos make up 20 percent of bank tellers, compared to 16.5 percent of the American workforce.

Bank tellers’ low pay means that many struggle to get by. About a third rely on some kind of public assistance, such as Medicaid, food stamps, or the Earned Income Tax Credit. Yet banks could pretty easily afford to pay them more. For every dollar in revenue that the 10 largest consumer banks make, they keep 20 cents in profit after compensating workers and paying overhead and taxes.

The NELP analysis argues that bank tellers should get a $15 minimum wage. If they were to start demanding that pay level, they would be part of a growing campaign kicked off by fast food employees three years ago and joined by retail workers, adjunct professors, and home care workers. The call has succeeded in cities that have raised their minimum wages to $15 an hour — San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles — and in New York State, where fast food employees are on the verge of getting that wage.