Wells Fargo fired whistleblowers for reporting unethical behavior

Rss@dailykos.com (laura Clawson) · Saturday, September 24, 2016, 8:21 pm

Headlines about the millions of unauthorized accounts created by Wells Fargo employees have focused on the wrongdoing by the workers. But you don’t end up with thousands of workers doing the same thing wrong millions of times without the employer bearing some responsibility. And Wells Fargo was definitely responsible, not only pressuring workers with unreasonable sales goals, but retaliating against whistleblowers:

"They ruined my life," Bill Bado, a former Wells Fargo banker in Pennsylvania, told CNNMoney.

Bado not only refused orders to open phony bank and credit accounts. The New Jersey man called an ethics hotline and sent an email to human resources in September 2013, flagging unethical sales activities he was being instructed to do.

Eight days after that email, a copy of which CNNMoney obtained, Bado was terminated. The stated reason? Tardiness.

Bado wasn’t alone. CNNMoney talked to another three former Wells Fargo workers who say they were fired under similar circumstances, and six others who say they witnessed such retaliation.

One former Wells Fargo human resources official even said the bank had a method in place to retaliate against tipsters. He said that Wells Fargo would find ways to fire employees "in retaliation for shining light" on sales issues. It could be as simple as monitoring the employee to find a fault, like showing up a few minutes late on several occasions.

"If this person was supposed to be at the branch at 8:30 a.m. and they showed up at 8:32 a.m, they would fire them," the former human resources official told CNNMoney, on the condition he remain anonymous out of fear for his career.

http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/7JLHdMED2-Q/-Wells-Fargo-fired-whistleblowers-for-reporting-unethical-behavior