More Welfare for Wall Street: One-in-Three Bank Tellers Need Public Assistance
When I was cashiering at a local store one of the employees from my Citibank branch paid for her baby formula with a WIC check. Married, only child-both working. I was disappointed that someone with a good job and a very prestigious bank could qualify.
Corporations have learned that the public will support their employees. They are scamming the system while complaining about regulations and taxes.
More: More Welfare for Wall Street: One-in-Three Bank Tellers Need Public Assistance
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.