Wall Street workers need unions, too

When most people think of Wall Street, they think of billionaires buying and selling companies and commuting by helicopter. Just like when most people think of professional baseball, they think of wealthy agents and team owners negotiating huge contracts for superstar players. But just as there are minor league baseball players for whom the reality is far different, there are lower-level Wall Street bankers who work punishing hours for substandard compensation.

I led the successful effort to unionize minor league ballplayers for better treatment, and I support the same for financial workers.

One particularly tragic story has recently captivated Wall Street, where terrible hours and the lack of a voice among junior employees has long been the norm. Leo Lukenas, a 35-year-old Bank of America associate, former Green Beret and father of two, died last month after allegedly working several consecutive 100-hour weeks. In the immediate aftermath of the news, a group of junior bankers publicly contemplated striking for better working conditions.

Over the past month, I have been approached by several people asking whether Wall Street bankers should unionize and whether it is possible. My answers have been unequivocal: Yes and yes.

In 2012, my first year as a minor league pitcher in the Arizona Diamondbacks organization, I made $3,300. As had been the norm for decades, players were expected to subsist on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and sleep in bedrooms with two or three other players. These working conditions were excused as paying one’s dues. Sound familiar?

After my baseball career ended, I became an attorney. In 2020, I left my job as a litigation associate at Williams & Connolly to become the executive director of the nonprofit Advocates for Minor Leaguers, which was formed to improve these conditions.

In 2022, after 150 years of minor league baseball and two years of organizing, I helped minor leaguers finally form a union to do just that. Within six months, we negotiated a collective bargaining agreement that more than doubled pay for all players and guaranteed free housing, meals, transportation and other benefits — none more important than the formal recognition of our status as key workers in a lucrative industry.

Since then, I have been approached by other workers, mostly across sports, who are interested in unionizing. I recently founded an organization called Sports Solidarity to take on this work. It is against this backdrop that I have received outreach about the formation of a Wall Street union. I am all for it.

Unions are, in my view, more important now than ever.

Americans constantly seek the right balance between our inherently contradictory guiding principles: freedom and equality, individualism and solidarity, capitalism and democracy. At present, we have achieved unprecedented economic prosperity at the national level and are freer and more capable of pursuing our individual ambitions than ever before. These are great things.

But our system is failing too many of us. Our immense wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few, while many of us struggle to simply feed our families each day. We are more polarized than ever. Faith in our democratic institutions, and our democracy itself, is suffering. In short, our balance is off.

Many of us recognize this on some level. But true clarity often comes only when faced with an extreme example. When a veteran and father dies doing what is required by his job at the center of our economy, we are forced to look in the mirror. Our system values profit production over service to country and family. And we don’t like it. It feels, somehow, un-American.

It is in this context that unions could arrive on Wall Street.

If they do, the incongruity would undoubtedly capture public attention and in turn inspire more unionization across the country. That would be a good thing. Widespread unionization is a tremendous tool to achieve the recalibration of our American ideals that we need right now. Via collective bargaining, unions ensure a more equal distribution of wealth. By forcing all of a company’s stakeholders to sit at a table and negotiate a fair resolution, unions show parties that disagree how to coexist. And because unions are democracies, they teach us how to achieve results through voting and political participation.

In short, unions pull our country in the direction of equality, solidarity and democracy. We need these values now more than ever.

The best part: all of this can occur without casting aside the innovation and efficient allocation of resources that comes with capitalism. If you don’t believe me, look at the unprecedented financial success of minor league baseball since the players unionized.

A Wall Street union? I hope so.

Harry Marino is a workers’ rights advocate, attorney, organizer and former professional baseball player.