Bankers Go Home, Tellers Stay: Virus Exposes Office Inequalities
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
This is just cherry picking imo. Jobs that require f2f and physical interaction as a core responsibility don't get remoted? You don't say.
If public services are expected to keep operating, it's rather obvious that the skeleton crews required to keep them operating include the guys actually providing the services to the public.
But what's really important is that some self-righteous political activist saw in a pandemic a good opportunity to force his political views onto others. Good job, comrade.
average admin staff is perhaps even paid less than the average RN in some places.
Do you have sources for this? Even though my submission was about the SARS-CoV-2 virus possibly being synthetic, I would love to have sources to combat that idea.
http://virological.org/t/the-proximal-origin-of-sars-cov-2/3...
Life and the human experience have never come with any guarantees of being fair or equal.
All that said, I fully expect bank branches to be closed just like other retail establishments will be.
And FWIW: a much bigger injustice is how many of these jobs in the service sectors are ephemeral in these situations. Wait staff and shopkeepers don't merely have to go in physically to work, they're at a much higher risk of losing their jobs entirely (or having their hours cut as, say, restaurants scale back).
That latter problem is something we can address with appropriate policy.
I work with people in sales, and IIRC they were the first ones to start to work from home, days before the software development teams started to follow suit.
It's not a class issue, but a company or even team issue.
If spending the weekend at a convention in another state is what's needed to make the sale I do that. If drinking with a visiting client until 2am is what's needed to make the sale I do that. If coming in to the office when there's no need and I might get sick and die and more importantly not be able to make sales, I don't do that.
"Sales" is a very broad role to the point where I think someone saying they do it is closer to someone saying they "make things" or "perform services" rather than "software developer" or "lawyer". It's more of a department than anything. Experiences working in it thus vary greatly.
What percentage of the work that tellers do could move over to those things with the buttons that let you have the money? I forget what they call them. Automated machines of some kind.
Once the higher level employees are staying home for their own safety, it's pretty chickenshit if the reasons the lower level employees are required to come in are things like profit and their lack of leverage, and not things like "they need to be there for the bank to operate at all".
And why are tellers not bankers? They perform one of the main public facing banking tasks/services.
Also how are tellers supposed to work from home? This is a rather unfair situation, but it's just the nature of the job, not some attack on the lower class.
I just find this whole article weird.
This question/claim only makes any sense if you're willing to consider that the cleaning staff might deserve to be called "bankers" too.
Tellers don't provide any banking services. They can't agree to hold your money or loan you money. They don't provide any advice. They're an implementation detail of the banking agreement you set up with an actual banker, a piece of plumbing that happens to be how you move money into or out of your account. Hence the popularity of automatic teller machines.
That is where my confusion lies. What is the definition of a banker? And what is their job title?
I would be comfortable calling e.g. a corporate treasurer a "banker" in this sense, though I wouldn't expect corporate treasurers to be included in the category "bankers" in the context of this piece.
For this piece, something like the intersection of (1) the definition I provide with (2) the class of people employed by "banks".
A teller occupies a position of responsibility in that they can cause a lot of mischief by misbehaving. But I don't think the responsibility to refrain from stealing from the company is the relevant kind of responsibility. A teller at work isn't supposed to be making any decisions of any kind.
On the negligible chance that you made this comment in earnest, the results may surprise you.
In my mental model, someone who handles, protects, counts, transfers, etc. money to and from customers is fairly literally "responsible for a flow of money".
I suspect you believe your definition requires a higher threshold and/or type of responsibility that these roles do not entail, but I don't see where that is in your definition.
I think maybe you what you mean is that our hypothetical banker is independently making some decisions around how / where / etc this money flows with some degree of autonomy ?
My point here was primarily just to say that it is maybe a bit thornier of a thing to define than you realize given that your definition in my honest opinion and in what I consider a reasonable reading did not clearly leave out one of the primary categories of employee that you intended it to exclude.
Sidenote - stating that "you will find most people will agree with me" is an, um, interesting method of argument.
Not at all. That is the standard for determining what something means.
What you're saying here is that I expressed an idea, you agree with me as to both what I meant by it and what other people would understand by it, but, for unstated reasons, you think my expression was metaphysically incorrect. Why?
The project of communication is for the listener to understand the same thing the speaker intended. If that happens, the communication was correct. As applied here, if I think "responsible for a flow of money", elucidated by a negative example, means something, and everyone else agrees with me that it means that thing... then that is in fact what it means. Words hold their meaning by common agreement, and solely by common agreement.
See https://www.bls.gov/ncs/ocs/ocsm/comba-be.htm which links the census term to https://www.bls.gov/ncs/ocs/ocsm/comB007.htm .
> B007 FINANCIAL MANAGERS Management and management related occupations in the financial field of banking, trust companies, credit agencies, investment agencies etc. Workers in this occupation are concerned with the management of financial affairs. Include the following occupations:
> Bank Cashier, Branch Manager, Comptroller, Credit Union Manager, Controller, Treasurer, Financial Director, Investment Manager, Accounting Department Manager, Accounts Supervisor, Auditing Department Manager
"Bank teller" has its own OCS entry, "D383 BANK TELLERS", at https://www.bls.gov/ncs/ocs/ocsm/comd383.htm :
> Exclude Cashiers (C276).
> Receive and pay out money and keep records of money and negotiable instruments involved in various bank transactions
Lawyers, software developers, and cleaning staff have their own OCS classifications and likely rarely call themselves a "banker" in the census.
The financial industry uses the term "banker" along the lines described at https://financialcareeroptions.com/financial-careers/financi... :
> A banker is an employee of a bank or financial institution who services the financial needs of clients. These clients can be individuals or institutions, both with different needs. A banker tries to maximize the profit of a bank while maintaining appropriate risk levels.
> Essentially, bankers raise capital to make loans and investments. They charge interest and fees for the services and seek profit on the investments
A teller, for example, does not do those tasks.
Can tellers not be trained for better-paying roles? Better yet, education is available to those who wish to utilize it (though the education system clearly has its own inefficiencies).
When you ask that question, you are doing this thing where you don't try to address the concern people actually have, which is about what an equitable employer-employee relationship looks like, not "role differentiation".
Problem is in some industries, staff have more political power than line, as we see in higher-ed and medicine. This upsets the balance and results in less/poorer quality production from line.
What I'm hearing from a friend who runs a branch of a major bank is that almost no one comes into the branch, because that's only needed for loans. The ATMs outside are busy.
I didn't know there were ATMs that didn't take checks.
In my experience with depositing checks into ATMs, they originally just asked you how much the check was for. This would obviously require human oversight at some point, but you as a customer never needed to interact with a human.
Eventually they started OCRing the checks and proposing to you what they thought the amount of the check was, subject to your correction. Human oversight is still needed, but dramatically reduced.
Back office folks have always been not as necessary day to day in person as much as front line anyone / anything.