The employee backlash over JPMorgan Chase’s 5-day-a-week return to work mandate is gaining momentum. Several workers have reached out to the Communications Workers of America about forming a union shortly after the country’s biggest bank increased its in-office policy from three to five days a week.
“I’m really against the full RTO out of empathy for a lot of colleagues whose personal lives will be upended. A lot of us have arranged our lives and [made] huge life decisions around being able to be remote a couple days a week or 40% of the time,” said a JP Morgan employee from a city in the Southwest who, like others cited in this story, asked not to be named for fear of losing their job.
According to Nick Weiner, an organizer with the CWA, about a dozen JPMorgan Chase employees, representing groups from different areas of the bank all over the U.S., have contacted the union. “They wanted information on how to unionize. We gave them directions and tasks for next steps,” said Weiner, adding that bank employees in other countries have also contacted these reps.
The CWA is a labor union that represents employees in many different industries including technology, customer service and airlines. In late 2023, Wells Fargo workers at an Albuquerque, New Mexico branch voted to join the CWA, a first in the banking industry. Roughly twenty-five Wells Fargo branches, including a group of conduct management investigators, have since unionized with the CWA, a spokesman said.
JPMorgan Chase is the nation’s biggest bank with $4 trillion in assets as of Dec. 31. If the workers are successful, JPMorgan Chase would be the second major bank to unionize.
“We support any bank workers who are trying to improve working conditions through collective action,” a CWA spokesman told Fortune.
JPMorgan Chase doesn’t think a union is the way to go. “We believe each employee deserves to be treated as an individual, and that the strongest relationship we can have with them is a direct one,” a JPM spokesman said.
Barron’s first reported that JPMorgan Chase workers were considering unionizing.
Back to the Office
On January 10, JPMorgan Chase set off a firestorm when the bank informed its more than 300,000 employees that all staff would be required to return to the office five days a week, possibly as early as March. Roughly 40% of the bank’s employees are currently on a hybrid schedule, where they are in the office three days a week.
About 60% of JPMorgan Chase’s staff, including many traders and retail branch workers, currently come into the office five days a week, Bloomberg reported.
“We know that some of you prefer a hybrid schedule and respectfully understand that not everyone will agree with this decision,” JPMorgan Chase’s operating committee said in the internal memo announcing the latest policy on return to office, which is commonly known as RTO in the corporate world.
Jamie Dimon, the much-beloved CEO of JPMorgan Chase, is a very vocal supporter of RTO, and sees bringing people back to the office as a sound business decision. “Being together greatly enhances mentoring, learning, brainstorming and getting things done,” JPMorgan’s operating committee, which includes Dimon, said in the internal memo.
JPMorgan Chase posted the memo on its intranet, prompting hundreds of comments, many of them negative, from employees. The bank then turned off the comment functionality, a practice it has done in the past when the volume gets high. The comment function for the RTO discussion remains disabled, according to several bank employees.
Several JPMorgan Chase employees contacted by Fortune were still angry about the RTO. One worker, also from the Southwest, who has been with the bank for several years, said they were “not a fan of the RTO,” because when they do go into office they just “sit on Zoom. My team is dispersed around the world.”
Some JPMorgan Chase employees are also contemplating an organized walkout but it’s unclear how much support such a measure would get, two of the sources said. JPM workers have also passed around a “Return to Office Employee Only Survey,” apparently created by an employee, that asked about the impact the RTO would have on overall well-being, as well as their interest in forming a union. Some employees are refusing to fill it out, claiming that “Jamie won’t change his mind because of a Google poll,” a third worker from a big Western city said.
