Tellers and bankers at a Wells Fargo branch in Egg Harbor, New Jersey, voted 5-4 on Wednesday to keep their union, according to unofficial results tallied by the National Labor Relations Board. The single-vote margin defeated a petition to decertify the Communications Workers of America unit the employees had formed in February 2024, and it broke a run of Wells Fargo branches that had spent much of this year cutting ties with the same union. The matter is docketed at the labor board as Case No. 04-RD-388660.
The outcome is small in raw numbers but pointed in its timing. Every other recent test of worker sentiment inside the bank had gone against the CWA. Workers at five branches across five states have dissolved their unions since the winter, including a Wells Fargo location in Seaside Park, New Jersey, and another in Casper, Wyoming. Earlier this year, employees at a branch in Connecticut voted the union down in the only certification election Wells Fargo has seen in 2026. Against that backdrop, the Egg Harbor vote is the first time in months that a decertification drive at the bank has failed.
Union organizing is close to unheard of in American banking. Fewer than one in a hundred bank employees is represented by a union, a share that has held for years. That is what made the CWA campaign notable: between 2023 and 2024, workers at 28 Wells Fargo locations voted to join Wells Fargo Workers United, the CWA affiliate behind the drive, in what labor advocates billed as the first serious union push at a major U.S. lender. The question ever since has been whether those wins would spread across the industry or stall out.
The momentum has clearly cooled. There were only four branch elections at Wells Fargo in 2025, down sharply from the burst of activity the year before. The petition to unwind the Egg Harbor unit was filed with free legal help from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, a nonprofit that represents workers seeking to remove unions and has been involved in most of the recent Wells Fargo cases. The group backed the Egg Harbor petition and four of the five successful decertifications elsewhere.
Decertification votes are uncommon on their own terms. The labor board fields only a few hundred petitions to remove a union each year, against thousands of certification elections, and they tend to succeed most easily at small workplaces — which describes nearly every Wells Fargo branch that has organized. The units are tiny, often fewer than ten non-managerial employees, so a handful of departures or a couple of changed minds can tip a branch either way. Egg Harbor, decided by one vote out of nine cast, is a plain case in point.
The foundation has argued that some unionized Wells Fargo employees soured on the CWA because the union has not landed a single contract with the bank since the first branch organized in late 2023. More than two years in, none of the unionized branches has a ratified agreement. The union tells a different story, accusing Wells Fargo of dragging out talks and refusing to bargain in good faith. Last month the CWA filed an unfair labor practice complaint with the labor board accusing the bank of making unilateral changes to working conditions at the Egg Harbor branch without first bargaining with the union.
Wells Fargo has not answered that complaint and did not comment on Wednesday’s vote. The bank has generally denied wrongdoing in the dozens of cases the union has filed against it, many of which have since been withdrawn or thrown out. The CWA and the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation did not respond to requests for comment.
The fight sits on top of the workplace complaints that fueled the organizing wave in the first place: thin staffing, pay that workers say has not kept up, and steady pressure to hit sales targets — the same pressure that produced the bank’s unauthorized-accounts scandal a decade ago and still shadows its branches. Those grievances have not gone away. But this year’s results suggest that frustration with the bank and frustration with the union can push workers in opposite directions.
For Wells Fargo, the result is a rare setback in a year that has mostly broken its way on the labor front, and it keeps at least one organized branch on the board as contract talks grind on. For the CWA, holding Egg Harbor by a single vote is thin comfort, but it stops the bleeding and preserves a foothold the union can point to as it presses the bank to negotiate.
In the legal lineup, Jerry Walters of Littler Mendelson represented Wells Fargo, Nicholas Hanlon appeared for the CWA, and Bart Valad of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation represented the worker who brought the petition. The labor board’s tally stays unofficial until certified, and either side can file objections. What happens next at the bargaining table — where nothing has been signed in more than two years — will say more about the campaign’s future than any single 5-4 count.
JBizNews Desk | Egg Harbor, New Jersey
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