In the News: The State of the Bank Employee on Wall Street

Posted in Bargaining for the Common Good In the News

Georgetown graduate student and Kalmanovitz Initiative research assistant Jordana Hoyt is making headlines with a report she authored entitled “The State of the Bank Employee on Wall Street (new window).” Findings from her report, which was commissioned by the Committee for Better Banks (new window) and supported by the Kalmanovitz Initiative, were mentioned last week in the Washington Post (new window), BusinessWeek (new window), NPR (new window), Huffington Post (new window), ThinkProgress (new window), and many other media outlets.

“I was incredibly excited to work with The Alliance for a Greater New York (ALIGN) and The Committee for Better Banks on this report about the working conditions of the bank employee on Wall Street,” Jordana said. “No one had before written in great detail about Wall Street’s labor-targeted, cost-cutting strategies and how they affected bank workers’ lives.”

The report, which used information from over 5,000 personal interviews and focus groups and surveys of over 200 bank workers, assesses the quality of jobs within the banking industry.
“What we uncovered together was a tale of two Wall Streets—one of high paid executives and rising profits and another of workers struggling with increasing job insecurity and pay cuts,” Jordana explained. “On Wall Street, it is really the retail, administrative, frontline and back office workers who are paying for a financial crisis that they had no part in creating.”

Jordana will graduate with a Master’s in Global, International and Comparative History in May 2014. She focuses her studies on Latin American social movements and is currently writing a thesis about the labor movement at the Chuquicamata copper mine in Northern Chile in the 1960s and 1970s.