Exclusive: Union accuses Wells Fargo exec of eavesdropping

Gabby Jones/Bloomberg

On a Friday morning in July, lawyers representing Wells Fargo convened in a New Mexico hotel conference room for their latest bargaining session with employees seeking to unionize. But the day's session was interrupted when a man's voice emanated from the laptop computer of one of the bank's lawyers.

Upon hearing the voice, members of Wells Fargo's bargaining team, which was led by attorneys from the law firm Littler Mendelson, looked surprised and flustered, according to four union representatives who were present.

"Everyone's eyes started to bulge, and people got pale for a second," said Belinda Signil, a former Wells employee who was in the room that day as part of the union's negotiating team. "It's almost the look of getting your hand caught in the cookie jar."

Andy King, another former Wells employee who was also in attendance as part of the union team, recalled that one of the bank's lawyers closed his laptop quickly. "And they all kind of looked freaked out," King said.

Union officials say that Wells Fargo had previously been adamant that people couldn't attend the bargaining sessions remotely, except in emergencies. But now the Wells team was transmitting the live audio of the session, without the union's permission, to at least one person who wasn't in the room.

That person was Stan Sherrill, a top labor-relations executive at Wells. A bank lawyer told the union representatives who were in the conference room that day that the voice they heard was Sherrill's.

Wells Fargo maintains that the laptop's connection to Sherrill was accidental — the result of a failure to close out of an internal Microsoft Teams meeting that had been held prior to the talks at the bargaining table.

"As we shared with the union at the time, this was a simple mistake — a laptop left connected to an internal meeting regarding the ongoing negotiations," Wells Fargo told American Banker in a written statement. "The caller was briefly a part of the online meeting, unaware that in-person negotiations were underway, and the online meeting was promptly disconnected once the error was recognized."

Union officials aren't buying Wells Fargo's story. They are distrustful amid lengthy talks that have yet to lead to a contract — and they suspect that an inadvertent failure to mute a call derailed a stealthy attempt to listen in on the bargaining session.

On Friday, Wells Fargo Workers United filed an unfair labor practices charge with the National Labor Relations Board. The union group, which is affiliated with the Communication Workers of America, alleges that Wells' actions violate the National Labor Relations Act's requirement that parties engage in good-faith negotiations.

"This surreptitious use of virtual meeting software with recording capabilities amounts to bad-faith bargaining," the union group wrote in a position paper that it submitted to the NLRB.

The $1.9 trillion-asset bank, which has been in talks with the union since November 2024, said: "Wells Fargo is committed to bargaining in good faith, and our goal is fair contracts for all involved."

While Wells is maintaining a positive public tone regarding the ongoing negotiations over a contract — the bank said last week that it appreciates what it described as constructive dialogue from the union side in July — comments by union representatives suggest that the negotiations have been tense and contentious.

Union organizers seeking to make inroads among U.S. bank workers have largely focused their efforts on Wells Fargo. In December 2023, a Wells branch in Albuquerque, New Mexico, became the first to vote in favor of a union. Since then, employees at 27 other Wells branches have followed suit, as have the workers in one non-branch unit, according to union officials.

Wells Fargo has repeatedly said that it respects its workers' right to unionize but believes they are best served by working directly with the company's leadership. Over the last two years, union officials say, they've filed more than 35 unfair labor practice charges against Wells.

During the bargaining process, union representatives have asked Wells on numerous occasions if people who were unable to fly in for in-person negotiations could listen via Zoom, said Bonnie Winther, a staff representative for the Communications Workers of America. Wells Fargo has generally taken the position that it won't allow virtual participation because bank officials wouldn't know who else was present, she said.

Winther, who attended last month's bargaining session in New Mexico, said that Wells made an exception to its usual stance on the day when the talks were interrupted by Sherrill's voice — agreeing to allow union staff people whose flights were delayed to participate virtually.

Winther called the Sherrill incident "jaw-dropping" and said she doesn't think it happened by accident.

"I believe it's probably happened before. They just happened to get caught," she said. "I'm not so sure that they haven't been doing this all along."

Sabrina Perez, a Wells employee who attended the July 18 bargaining session as part of the union group, expressed another suspicion: that Sherrill was not the only bank representative on the call.

She said that on several occasions during the nine-month-old bargaining process, moments passed by as Wells Fargo representatives looked at their computers before responding to something that a union representative had said.

The union participants have wondered whether Wells representatives who are not at the bargaining table are listening and typing suggestions for how to respond in a group chat, according to Perez. "And so we've always had that suspicion of … why does that continue to happen?" she said.

Wells said last week that Sherrill was the only person on the Microsoft Teams call, and that he was only connected for a brief time. The bank also said that its notes indicate that only Wells Fargo's negotiating team was speaking while Sherrill was on the call.

In the union's position paper to the NLRB, it cited a recent memo by the NLRB's acting general counsel, who wrote that surreptitious recordings of collective-bargaining sessions constitute violations of the National Labor Relations Act.

"The presence of a recording device may have a tendency to inhibit free and open discussions. This may be especially true when sensitive or confidential matters will be discussed. The spontaneity and flexibility which are commonly manifested during bargaining may be lost," NLRB Acting General Counsel William Cowen wrote in the June 25, 2025, internal memo.

Union officials acknowledged last week that they didn't know whether Wells Fargo recorded the call where Sherrill's voice was heard, but they noted that online meeting software generally has recording capabilities. Wells said the call was not recorded, and added that the bank expressly prohibits the recording or transcription of calls.