MINNEAPOLIS – After disrupting a meeting of the Minnesota Bankers Association last week as they met in Saint Paul, workers and students briefly took over the lobby of Wells Fargo Center in downtown Minneapolis today, protesting Wells Fargo’s lending practices while tens of thousands of Minnesota homes have been foreclosed on in the last few years.
“My family and I lost our home on February 5 after making 5 years of payments to Wells Fargo,” said Armando Diaz, a janitor at Normandale Lake Office Park. “I tried to work something out with Wells Fargo because I couldn't afford the mortgage, even with two jobs. Last year when Wells Fargo needed help, they got a $25 billion bailout, but when I asked for help, they said ‘no.’”
Wells Fargo rejects home purchase applicants of color more often than white applicants, according to Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data. Wells Fargo has denied African-Americans a purchase loan three times more than whites. Latinos at Wells Fargo were almost twice as likely as whites to be rejected for purchase and refinance loans. The bank under-serves low and moderate income neighborhoods, making less than 2% of their FHA purchase loans and less than 3% of their conventional loans to persons from low income neighborhoods, and 12% of its conventional purchase loans and 15% of its FHA purchase loans to persons from moderate income neighborhoods.
Janitors joined students and other concerned citizens this morning in the lobby of the Wells Fargo Center to highlight how Wells Fargo is “playing monopoly with our lives.” “Minneapoly” money rained down on the lobby and gamepiece houses littered the floor as people held up pieces of a “Minneapoly” board showing the number of homes foreclosed on in Twin Cities metropolitan counties during 2009.
“It's outrageous to me that after taking billions of our tax dollars in bailout money, the big banks are still foreclosing on people’s homes instead of keeping mortgages affordable and keeping their customers,” said Rosalina Gavilan Gomez, a janitor at US Bancorp in Minneapolis who is about to lose her home to foreclosure.
Twin Cities’ janitors clean buildings owned by Fortune 500 companies that continue to rake in billions in net profits during the recession, such as US Bancorp, Medtronic, and Wells Fargo, while the janitors struggle to make a living and support their families.
Full-time janitors make as little as $20,200 a year, before taxes, and many face thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket medical costs due to poor coverage, or do not go to the doctor out of fear of incurring big bills.
Janitors at ABM and Harvard, who clean commercial office buildings and corporate headquarters across the Twin Cities region, have voted to authorize a strike over unfair labor practices and could walk off the job at any time. They have been bargaining for months with their employers, and they have been working without a contract since January 8.