Can you sign our letter to CEO Ken Lewis demanding answers for bank employees? Click here to add your initials to our letter to CEO Ken Lewis.

It was widely reported this week that Bank of America is seriously considering the elimination of up to 10% of the bank's branches, with CEO Ken Lewis discussing the proposal with investors. If those reports are true, that means the jobs of up to 5,000 bank employees at hundreds of Bank of America branches are at risk.

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.

Thousands of school food service workers in New Jersey are living at or near poverty, according to a new report commissioned by SEIU Local 32BJ. The report found that the average hourly wage for food preparation workers in educational services was only $8.15, and revealed that many of these jobs pay no more than the NJ state minimum wage of $7.15.

The report, prepared by the Rutgers University Center for Women and Work/School of Management, ascertained that 64 percent of NJ K-12 school districts contract their food service to an outside company and that those private sector cafeteria jobs are largely part-time and typical offer with no affordable health benefits. As a result, most workers are uninsured or forced to turn to the state's public health insurance programs-- a result that contributes largely to the school food service industry acting as one of the biggest drains on New Jersey FamilyCare, as over 6,300 employees and their children covered by the taxpayer-funded state health assistance plan.

"For me and for so many of my co-workers, the main issue is our healthcare," said Annie Davis, a 54-year-old New York security officer and SEIU Local 32BJ member during her day-long visit with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. "We don't have sick days. We don't get paid for holidays. It's not even so much our wages, it's the benefits...We are doing some of the most important jobs in the city. "

Davis, who works in the lobby of the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in downtown NYC, makes $11.75 an hour with no days off and no medical coverage. She is one of 1,100 guards at 20 agencies throughout the city who work for private contractor Allied Barton and are considering going on strike by the end of May if things don't improve.

According to Mayor Bloomberg, his day spent with security officer Annie Brown "renewed his appreciation" for what workers go through every day to makes end meet in New York and take care of their families. On his campaign blog, Mayor Bloomberg reflects back on his day spent with Brown as part of Local 32BJ's "Walk a Day in My Shoes" campaign, acknowledging that in spite of the initiatives his administration has invested in to improve the training and compensation of NY's security officers, there's "much more to be done" to ensure the "security guards [that play] a pivotal role in keeping all eight million of us safe" are "well-paid, well-trained, and well-treated." Read the Mayor's blog here.

"Walking a day with a working New Yorker shouldn't just be a prerequisite for our union's endorsement, but a requirement for the job," said 32BJ President Mike Fishman of the local union's "Walk a Day in My Shoes" campaign to get every elected official to experience firsthand what life is like for working people. Mayor Bloomberg is the second NYC mayoral candidate to have taken part in the campaign, after City Comptroller William C. Thompson Jr. walked a day in the shoes of 32BJ member Lateef Rivers last week, spending part of Rivers' shift with him at the Brooklyn Municipal Building.

Read more about about Mayor Bloomberg's and Mr. Thompson's walk-a-days with SEIU 32BJ members in the NY Daily News and the NY Times. Video of Mayor Bloomberg's day with Annie Brown at NY1 here.