She Helped a Customer in Need. Then U.S. Bank Fired Her.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/01/opinion/sunday/us-bank-fired-employee.html

By Nicholas Kristof
Feb. 1, 2020

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On Christmas Eve, Eugenio found himself parked at a gas station in Clackamas, Ore., a Portland suburb, both his fuel gauge and his bank balance on empty. A bank employee had told him that money would soon show up in his account — perhaps a ruse to get him out of the branch office. For hours Eugenio then tried his debit card at the gas pump, so he could buy a few gallons and get home to his wife and children.

“I was stranded,” he told me. “I could have walked home, but it would have been five miles in the cold.”

That’s when Eugenio found an angel.

He telephoned the bank’s toll-free number and spoke with Emily James, a senior officer at a call center in Portland. She spent an hour on the phone with Eugenio, trying to get some money released so he could at least get home. She soon realized that he had been misled, and that money wouldn’t reach his account any time soon. Feeling badly for a customer stuck on Christmas Eve, James offered to drive over from her call center and personally hand him $20.

“No, no, no,” Eugenio told her. He couldn’t impose. But she suggested she could use her break, and she received permission from a supervisor to drive 20 minutes to Eugenio. She later recalled that when she arrived, she wished him Merry Christmas and handed him $20 of her own money.

“Twenty dollars wouldn’t break me,” she explained to me, “and it would enable him to get home to his family.”

When U.S. Bank found out that it had such a generous employee, what did it do? It fired her.

“She broke the rules, putting herself and the bank at unnecessary risk,” U.S. Bank said in a statement. The company bars call center workers from meeting customers, so it dismissed both her and the manager who had approved her trip. The manager, Abigail Gilbert, told me that James’s account was essentially correct.

James had worked at the bank since 2017 and had received numerous commendations and awards that I examined, but the bank paid her no severance. She is single and used her last paycheck to buy sacks of food for her two dogs, Domino and Harley Quinn. She is now reduced to selling blood plasma, at $25 a visit.

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One bit of reassurance: Some chief executives do seem more enlightened than Cecere. After The Oregonian wrote two excellent articles about James, other companies reached out to her, saying that she’s the kind of caring person they want to attract.

“No job offers yet,” she told me, “but there are a couple of possibilities I’m really excited by.”