Just another way we all subsidize the big banks
by David Atkins
This story has been out there for a few days now, but it’s so outrageous that it bears repeating: Americans aren’t just subsidizing the low wages of WalMart and fast food chains by having to publicly assist their hardworking but underpaid employees. We’re also subsidizing the banks as well who, despite being outrageously profitable and subsidized in a variety of other ways, are vastly underpaying their tellers:
Almost a third of the country’s half-million bank tellers rely on some form of public assistance to get by, according to a report due out Wednesday.
Researchers say taxpayers are doling out nearly $900 million a year to supplement the wages of bank tellers, which amounts to a public subsidy for multibillion-dollar banks. The workers collect $105 million in food stamps, $250 million through the earned income tax credit and $534 million by way of Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, according to the University of California at Berkeley’s Labor Center.
The center provided the data to the Committee for Better Banks, a coalition of labor advocacy groups that published the broader study, to be released Wednesday, on the conditions of bank workers in the heart of the financial industry, New York. In the that state alone, 39 percent of tellers and their family members are enrolled in some form of public assistance program, the data show.
“This is the wealthiest and most powerful industry in the world, and it’s substantially subsidized by our tax dollars, money that we could be spending on child care or pre-K,” said Deborah Axt, co-executive director at Make the Road New York, one of four coalition members.
Profits at the nation’s banks topped $141.3 billion last year, with the median chief executive pay hovering around $552,000, according to SNL Financial. In contrast, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics pegs the median annual income of a bank teller at $24,100, or $11.59 an hour.
The government shouldn’t be giving billionaire bankers a single dime in exemptions or subsidies without demanding that they pay all their employees a decent living wage. It’s an outrage.
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