Second branch of Lake Michigan Credit Union launches union bid | Credit Union Journal

Frontline staff at a second Lake Michigan Credit Union branch are launching a union organizing campaign and are hoping to build on the momentum started by their colleagues who also recently unionized.

Employees of the Bonita Beach Road location in Bonita Springs, Florida, sent a letter on Thursday to executives of the $12 billion-asset LMCU in Caledonia, Michigan, that outlined their plans to unionize with the Communications Workers of America, which is a national labor organization that advocates on behalf of those working in the communications industry, as well as health care, higher education and more. The workers are hoping to become official members of the LMCU Workers Alliance, the advocacy group started by employees from a LMCU branch in Grand Rapids.

The Bonita Beach branch has three staff members, two of whom are nonmanagerial. The two filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board to hold an election that would oversee their decision to unionize and formalize their registration with a national organization such as the CWA. Both employees allege LMCU was unresponsive to requests for additional compensation and staff at the branch.

The letter gave LMCU executives until March 1 to voluntarily recognize the union and avoid an NLRB-officiated election. In response to the notification, LMCU denied the CWA’s claims of unfair labor practices and stated that it respects “the rights of all employees to exercise their rights to organize” as well as looks forward to “the next steps before the National Labor Relations Board.”

Roughly a dozen employees from the credit union’s South Division Avenue branch in Grand Rapids, Michigan, unionized and formed the LMCU Workers Alliance in December. Those workers claimed they decided to take that step after management failed to address concerns regarding employee burnout, stagnant wages and underappreciation for the institution’s bilingual staffers — a large number of whom are located at the branch. 

LMCU originally issued a statement in response to the formation of the Workers Alliance and responded that “outside unions have their own agenda, are divisive and are unnecessary for us to maintain our high employment standards and customer service.”

Ivan Diaz, former member service representative, and Allyssa Zamarripa, former assistant branch manager at the Grand Rapids location, filed Unfair Labor Practice charges against the credit union after alleging they were terminated for supporting or being involved in the union campaign. LMCU described Diaz’s claims as “unfounded” and is anticipating “a productive relationship with the union recently formed at one of our branches.”

Concerns regarding staffing and employee development at the Bonita Springs location echoed problems brought up by the founding members of the Workers Alliance from Grand Rapids, said Kam Pierre, head teller at the Bonita Beach Road branch and one of the staffers organizing the campaign.

“We started to notice certain issues related to staffing, development, that kind of stuff [and] realized there’s a theme that’s happening here, that’s not happening [to the same degree] in Michigan, and that’s why we think there’s a really huge need for the branches down here to start unionizing,” Pierre said.

As one of the smallest full-service locations operated by LMCU, Pierre stressed that the calls for added compensation and a larger network of employees to call on for substitutions are vital to help offset the alleged issues of overworking. With only two staff members regularly at the location, it can be difficult for each person to get sufficient breaks, especially if one person has to call out for any reason, she said. 

That can be daunting for new workers who are still learning important internal processes, such as account openings and loan applications, the workers argued.

Olga Valdez, who joined the credit union as a member service representative two months ago, said she has been frustrated with the lack of adequate training while working at the Bonita Beach Road branch.

“When we first started talking about unionizing, I was a little scared because I’m still learning, I’m still training and I feel like my job could be on the line. … There’s just not enough people to help mentor, there’s not enough people to cover if I’m not at my branch at the moment and it’s just not fair all around,” Valdez said. “That’s why I kind of left that fear aside and decided to unionize alongside Kam.”

Unions are rare in the financial services sector, though not unheard of. Executives at the $39 million-asset Genesee Co-Op Federal Credit Union in Rochester, New York, and the $1.6 billion-asset Beneficial State Bank in Oakland, California, recognized their employees’ union efforts in 2020 and 2022 respectively.

Experts with UNI Global Union, a Nyon, Switzerland-based international federation of labor organizations that spans 150 countries and 20 million members, highlighted the growth of “anti-union” campaigns as a leading cause for the difficulty in launching a new union.

“Most of the unions that exist today in the United States were originally organized quite a long time ago and since then, there’s been a multibillion-dollar anti-union industry that’s come to grow and very much dominate the process of creating unions in the United States,” said Christy Hoffman, general secretary of UNI Global Union.”In the finance sector, I’ve detected this feeling of ‘we will not be the first one to crack’ [among bank executives] with the exception of a few very important case examples.” 

Hoffman emphasized that a valuable tool for bolstering organization efforts in the U.S. involves hearing from workers in other countries such as Brazil and Italy, where unions in the financial sector are more common.

The CWA will continue its support of current and prospective members as Valdez and Pierre approach the prospect of an election.

“When something like [Diaz’s termination] happens, there’s certainly a lot of nervousness, but a lot of folks are also like, ‘Hey, we want to make a change,’ so our role is to help those folks understand their rights and figure out a path forward,” said Nick Weiner, organizing director of the Committee for Better Banks campaign founded by the CWA.