The Contrary Customer

Insufficient time and resources are not the only constraints on the FSU’s customer-focused campaigns. Its attempts to create alliances with the retail bank customers have been constrained by the complexity of worker relations and customer relations in the major retail banks. The discourse of ‘customers as allies’ and claims of customer support are somewhat at odds with the high levels of customer abuse faced by bank staff. The prevalence of customer abuse was highlighted by David Morgan, CEO of Westpac, in his address to shareholders at the Bank’s AGM in 2001:

Any customer or community dissatisfaction directly affects our staff – hostile and disenchanted customers are damaging to their morale and confidence, corrosive to the most fundamental relationship in our business. I am very conscious of the injustice that is sometimes done to our staff personally (Morgan 2001).

Bank staff and customers share many of the effects and consequences of change in retail banking. Yet, retail bank staff are the public face of bank management and the only people to which dissatisfied customers can directly voice their frustration and anger. In response to the abuse directed at workers by angry customers, a CBA branch manager and FSU delegate in Sydney’s western suburbs has introduced an innovative reward scheme in order to help staff cope with the abuse they face on a daily basis. As she explained: “We get some very rude customers, so I introduced an award system for my staff where you got points for the number of rude names you were called in a week. The more rude names, the more points” (Interview 14 June 2001). As Tyler and Taylor (2001: 73) note:

Service workers without the authority to alter work routines or policies, from management point of view, provide a useful buffer zone for absorbing and diffusing the hostility of dissatisfied customers that might otherwise be directed against senior management as a whole.

Indeed, for many front-line bank workers the customer is “our friend, the enemy”

(Benson 1986:6).

Curtailing an abusive worker-customer relationship needs to be an integral part of any successful service unionism (Cobble 1996: 347) and the FSU has sought to ameliorate the tensions in the relationship between retail bank workers and customers by drawing customers into its campaigns. Peter Presdee, Secretary of the Commonwealth Bank Officers’ Section, NSW/ACT Branch, recalled how customer support assisted the FSU during its campaigns against attempts by CBA management to move its 20,000 staff onto AWAs. While the union was arguing against the legality of the AWAs in the Federal Court²⁷, lunchtime rallies were held outside prominent branches around the country. The FSU reported that “in Melbourne over fifteen hundred CBA customers signed a petition in a couple of hours protesting the bank’s declining service” (Lewis 2000b). Presdee reported that the campaign received enormous support from the public and when the FSU marched down the streets after a

27 On 28 September 2000 the Federal Court ordered the bank to stop offering AWAs. Judge Finkelstein found that “the object of the bank in making the offers (of AWAs) … was not an end in itself. This makes it necessary to decide why the offers were made. On the present state of evidence, a very likely explanation is that they were made to bring an end to the deadlock in the (enterprise bargaining) negotiations” (Way 2000: 4).

rally the public were clapping and cheering (Lewis 2000a). He explained the benefits of drawing attention to the needs of both workers and customers in campaigns:

If we have to call a dispute the community understands, but more importantly when a person goes into a bank you are going to get the customer empathising with the staff members. So the staff member has a friend on the other side of the counter (Interview, 30 May 2001).

Yet this also presents the union with a strategic dilemma. In those instances where a close relationship between workers and customers does exist, workers may be less willing to take industrial action. This, however, can be reversed when the customer identifies closely with the issues behind the industrial action. As Mark Lynch, FSU Team Leader - Communications and Industry Policy, explained:

I have no doubt that you would find that our members are far more loyal to customers than they are to their employers and the reason they might not want to go on strike is far more related to not wanting to let down their customers than not wanting to let down their employer. In the last action we took, I think our members got a great boost because when they talked to customers about taking action, customers encouraged them. They said, ‘you take the action, you go on strike, you won’t be hurting me.’ (Interview, 31 May 2002).

While the level of customer dissatisfaction with banks has the potential to assist the FSU’s attempts to incorporate them into its campaigning, there is also the possibility that bank management will be little affected by such union-customer alliances. The customers most likely to identify with concerns over branch closures and understaffing in branches are those operating transaction accounts and using over-the-counter services. They are the customers that bank management refer to as ‘low-value’ customers, and it may well serve the large retail banks’ interests if these customers were to take their banking elsewhere.

Retail bank customers’ consumer power is also restricted by their limited mobility as consumers. A survey by ACA in 2000 indicated that despite the obvious dissatisfaction of many of the survey respondents with the service being provided by their bank, only “22 per cent had changed their institution in the last five years, and 52 per cent had held their account for 11 years or more” (ACA 2000: 18). For this reason, retail bank customers do not have the same degree of consumer power that customers in the retail clothing sector have been able to demonstrate in the consumer campaigns run by the Textile Clothing and Footwear Union (TCFU). Through a combination of court action and direct protests at retail stores, the TCFU was able to

bring clothing retailers, albeit reluctantly, under provisions regulating outwork (Weller 1999: 215). As Weller (1999: 221) argues: “The unique sensitivity of clothing markets to consumer sentiment has been crucial to changing employer attitudes, but this suggests that the consumer campaign strategy is unlikely to meet with the same degree of success in other sectors”.

Customers in retail banking may identify with the concerns of retail bank workers but this may not translate into effective alliances where customers continue to view themselves as powerless victims of the big banks. As Mark Lynch explained:

What we really need to work out is a way to convince the customers that they aren’t powerless in this debate. Most people say, “I hate banks, but I can’t do anything about it”. If you say to them, “You don’t like what your bank is doing go somewhere else”, they say, “Well why would I do that, they are all the same and it is too much trouble to change” (Interview, 31 May 2002).

Given this apparent sense of powerlessness, customer campaigns are likely to be limited in their effectiveness. It is only where customers perceive that they have genuine alternatives that they may exercise ‘consumer sovereignty’ by withdrawing their business.

Customer-focused initiatives should also acknowledge that retail bank customers are not a homogenous group. The FSU’s customer-focused strategy failed to recognise that the banks’ strategy of customer segmentation means that not all customers will respond to their appeals for support. Not all customers have experienced the changes in retail banking in the same way: ‘high-value’ customers continue to receive high levels of personalised customer service. Further, those customers that do identify with worker concerns are also just as likely to take their frustrations out on those workers as they are to become their allies. Here, the approach taken by the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers’ (HUCTW) is especially instructive. Through its close relationship with its grass-roots members, the HUCTW understood the complexities of the customer service relationship and drew on a discourse of “the customer is always interesting”, which recognised that customers can provide both satisfaction and frustration for front-line service workers.

Further, the HUCTW’s discourse ran counter to the managerial discourse of “the customer is always right” and “help[ed] workers set boundaries around their abilities to satisfy everyone, thereby creating a more equitable and mutually honest

relationship with employers, supervisors and ‘help-seekers’ [customers]” (Eaton 1996: 323). Constructing the customer as simply an ally of bank workers overlooks the complexity of the relationship between customers and workers and fails to acknowledge that customers are capable of behaving both as a “friend and an enemy”

of front-line service workers (Benson 1986: 6)

Further, the case of retail bank customers reinforces the argument put in Chapter Two that while a discourse of ‘customer as ally’ may be used to counter the effects of a managerial strategy that constructs ‘the customer as king’, the idea of ‘customer as ally’ itself draws on flawed notions of the sovereign customer. The FSU’s notion of the ‘customer as ally’ was predicated on the assumption that customers are ‘free to choose’. Yet as this chapter and the previous have shown, retail bank customer have very limited choices.

5.7 Conclusion

The FSU has incorporated the notion of the supportive customer into its communications with members and formed temporary alliances with consumer groups. In developing its campaigns and strategies, the FSU has drawn, in part, on the concept of ‘community unionism’. However, the campaigns outlined in this paper could not be described as ‘community unionism’, for as Tufts (1998: 232) asserts,

“the formation of coalitions of support does not alone constitute community unionism”. Rather than forming broad-based, local alliances the FSU has, at best developed only loose coalitions with some bank customers and consumer groups.

The FSU’s corporate campaigns were largely unsuccessful because they did not succeed in the key component of such campaigning; that is, the campaigns did not affect the bank’s bottom line (Slaughter 1990). Campaigning at the corporate level has had limited impact because of the relative powerlessness of ‘ordinary’ as opposed to ‘institutional’ shareholders and the limited consumer power of bank customers.

While, the consumer and social justice groups have been prepared to lend their support to the FSU, they have not formed partnerships with one another. Fine (1998:

138) draws an important distinction in campaigning between support and participation, and argues that the key to moving from passive support to participation lies in forming relationships at the local level and having the union’s national office play more of a support role. The FSU might have more success in creating a sense of

shared agendas if it were to work at establishing alliances at the local level as well as continuing to strengthen their alliances at the peak or national level.

A key feature of the successful ‘community-union’ alliances conducted in the US has been the way they have operated at the grassroots level. The failure of the FSU to engage with local employees and customers in their ‘Save our Services’

campaign points to the key component of any campaign, that is that it must be run at the local level and actively engage the union’s rank and file. If the FSU wants to form participatory consumer-union alliances, the evidence suggests that it should consider forming relationships at the local level and have the union’s national office play a supporting role.

Incorporating customers into the FSU’s campaigns was always going to be an attractive option given the high level of customer disillusionment with the major retail banks in Australia. However, high levels of customer dissatisfaction have also meant that front-line workers have had to bear the daily abuse that this dissatisfaction engenders. Customers can be both ‘friend and enemy’ to front line service workers and the union faces a difficult task balancing its response to these two faces of the customer. In an effort to redirect this customer abuse and anger away from front-line retail bank staff, the FSU has drawn on a discourse of ‘shared concerns’ and constructed customers as allies of bank workers. However, the limited consumer power of individual retail bank customers has limited their effectiveness as allies.

Examining the FSU’s customer-focused corporate and political campaigns has highlighted a number of constraints associated with such strategies. It has also provided insights into the potential of these strategies to effect change. Exploring the FSU’s construction of the ‘customer as ally’ has also highlighted the potential of discourse as a resource that unions can draw upon.

The following chapter introduces the credit union movement, another long-term player in retail banking, whose philosophy centres on a discourse of ‘member’ not

‘customer’. Credit unions, on the face of it, offer a very different discourse of the

‘customer’ and ‘customer service’ to that offered by the large retail banks. By claiming to offer a ‘genuine’ alternative to the big banks, credit unions offer potentially different customer and employment relations strategies.