If you are a Bank of America employee, we need you to add your initials to our letter to Ken Lewis.

"It is absurd that no matter what happens in the economy these guys figure out a way to award themselves with enormous bonuses and there seems to be no problem with laying off workers," said SEIU's Stephen Lerner. "On the one hand the government is trying to stimulate the economy by pumping money into banks. But everything these banks are doing exacerbates the problem that they are supposed to be solving."

Bank of America employees need answers to questions about these drastic closure plans--at the very least, information about how they could be affected by branch closings. "There has been no communication with workers, as far as we have talked to, about what is happening, what their rights will be, if they get severance pay, if there will be buyouts, if their health care will be continued...And most importantly, there has been no discussion if they will take the money they pay in bonuses and move it to help their workers survive unemployment," said Lerner.

So, we decided to do BofA a solid by writing a letter to CEO Ken Lewis with several questions he should answer for his employees. Here's part of the letter to Lewis:

A spokesperson described this proposal as part of the "long-term direction of the company." But with families facing continued financial uncertainty, we believe this is the wrong time to eliminate the jobs of 5,000 workers and leave millions of our customers without the financial advice they need to get through this crisis.

We deserve answers to the following questions on your closure plans and the "long-term direction of the company."

  1. How many current Bank of America employees' jobs will be eliminated?
  2. Will laid off bank employees receive any severance pay?
  3. Will you give bank employees a say in how you close branches?
  4. Will you and other bank executives continue to accept bonuses after laying off thousands of workers?

If you want answers to these questions, we need your support for our letter to CEO Ken Lewis--click here to add your initials to our letter.

As the backbone of Bank of America, frontline bank workers helped drive the growth of the company for low wages, while executives took home huge paychecks and bonuses. Take CEO Ken Lewis, for example: while the bank crashed, he made $6,019 an hour. In the last three months alone, Bank of America made more than $3 billion in profits. And according to a newly-released report by NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, BofA also issued $3.33 billion in cash and stock bonuses to executives last year. Merrill Lynch, which merged with BofA in January, issued $3.6 billion in bonuses despite having losses of more than $27 billion. This means that combined, the banks had 860 employees who were each given bonuses worth at least $1 million.

But that's not all....Bank of America has spent an additional $1.5 million in lobbying fees since January 2009. Does that sound right to you?

Even though taxpayers are backing Bank of America with $199.2 billion, it's the front-line bank workers who are going to hurt the most. But you can do something about it. Sign our letter to Lewis and demand answers about bank branch closures.