Democrats want the Labor Department to pile onto the investigations of Wells Fargo for its fake customer accounts scandal.
Eight Senate Democrats on Thursday asked Labor Secretary Thomas Perez and David Weil, head of the agency’s wage and hour division, to investigate the megabank for potentially violating the Fair Labor Standards Act in pressing employees to meet goals for opening accounts.
The senators, including Banking Committee Chairman Sherrod Brown of Ohio as well as Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, said that Wells Fargo maintained “a workplace characterized by stringent sales quotas and aggressive incentives imposed on its employees, and staggering neglect by management of the obvious consequences to consumers of those quotas and incentives.”
They asked for the agency specifically to look into whether the bank violated overtime regulations by forcing employees to work nights or weekends to meet the aggressive goals for opening accounts.
Wells Fargo has paid more than $180 million to regulators in fines for creating accounts for customers that they did not want or even know about, in some cases creating PINs or email addresses for them.
But Democrats are not satisfied and have called for the Department of Justice to pursue criminal charges against executives and for the Securities and Exchange Commission to probe whether executives misrepresented the company to investors.
Now they also want the Labor Department investigating whether the bank wronged employees, although they acknowledged that the 5,300 employees the bank fired for their roles in the widespread faking of accounts had only themselves to blame.
The regulatory investigation into Wells Fargo began after the media reported on employees’ stories of creating illicit accounts to meet goals. More employees have come forward with similar stories in the wake of the regulatory action, including one published by CNN Wednesday claiming that he reported malfeasance to the bank’s ethics hotline, only to be fired later.
Also signing the letter sent to the Labor Department Thursday were Jack Reed of Rhode Island, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Menzie Hirono of Hawaii, Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York.
Source: washingtonexaminer.com
