Union-Owned Bank Opens Branch in L.A.
New York-based Amalgamated Bank, a union-owned bank established for workingclass people, has opened its first branch on the West Coast in Pasadena, Calif.
Glenn Ezard, senior vice president of Amalgamated and head of West Coast operations, said that the bank, also referred to as America’s Labor Bank, opened the new branch to extend the same services to the West Coast that it has been providing on the East Coast since 1923.
“We’ve been doing this for a while now, and what we do is focus on providing banking services to working families,” said Ezard. “That’s our goal in Los Angeles, and there’s nothing really different from what we do in New York, New Jersey and Washington, D.C. The people we serve are working people and the organizations that support them.”
Amalgamated is owned by the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE) and initially entered the Southern California market in 1998 with the acquisition of a local trust company, according to Ezard.
“We initially came for the trust opportunities and saw opportunities for commercial banking,” he said. “We purchased First Trade Union Bank, which is now Amalgamated Trust Co., and we found a way to transfer that charter to full commercial banking services at the end of 2001. We found Los Angeles to be a vibrant community for labor that has a good understanding of the need for banking services.”
Ezard also said that the bank’s goal is to provide banking services for those who have been abandoned by bank mergers that focus on large depositors. “Generally, with the mergers we’ve seen in banking, a lot of regular working people are being left out and are not getting the services that people with larger accounts get,” he said. “We’re emphasizing our offering of services that they don’t normally get as a smaller depositor.”
Amalgamated’s services include a trust department, depository services to unions and loans to projects that provide union jobs, such as sweatX, a garment factory founded by Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry’s that opened in April.
The funding of sweatX was through Amalgamated and Hot Fudge Ventures, Cohen’s venture capital fund, according to Ezard.
“They wanted to work within the garment industry and wanted to make a statement,” said Ezard. “They had been working with UNITE in Los Angeles to come up with a bargaining agreement and needed some financial services. We liked their business model and provided financing, and they now have 52 workers with full benefits and scheduled breaks.”
Amalgamated holds some $22 billion in trust assets ($6.7 billion of which is administered from Los Angeles) in over 650 accounts. The bank was recently the first major institutional investor to bring suit against Enron insiders.
Amalgamated operates nine branch locations with over 160,000 depositors. —Darryl James
