It’s time to walk off the job.
Join the March4Justice and make it the most vital task you can perform today that keeps your bank in business, your children in clothing and collectively building a sense of progress and purpose that feeds the regrowth in Australian banking.
March4Justice events have the feel of a fateful, full-throated beginning of something; a swerve in the Kondratieff wave.
Thank feminism and feminists and free education for fighting back.
They are peaceful events. Please observe all local rules and Covid safety requirements
The Australia-wide listing of March4Justice events is here.
One side-project to this week's rallying to combat violence in the worrkplace (banks and all) is an upending of the blokey, privileged and overall clumsy character of the financial services industry we live and breathe …. Pray for a reckoning across the banking sector for the protected, prominent and trainee sex offenders and fraudsters of the future.
Of course, opportunists from this mob will be on the march.
Meanwhile, as #METOO uncovers the trash, we could see one or more top Australian banking execs out in no time. Touchy-feely entitled types are 10 a dozen in the 2021 social strata and inhabit all layers of the ABA’s discredited pillars.
Then will come the sackings by banks for cover-ups and ongoing offences by the most elite and most unafraid in company's ranks.
If you can clean and repair and re-position the bank’s board table then Banking Day votes for a janitor (it may well be one more woman), ex-officio, on each board of an Australian top 20 bank, alongside the Treasury delegate, a long overdue reform.
Don’t bark about the range of their experience, or question too closely their background in technical, operational and governance matters.
Such as credit. Believe me, this is not the least bit of a hindrance by the standards of the day.
Go on, do yourselves a favour. Pester the investor relations team, ask:
Of the top 100 – or 1000 – executives, how many have deep experience in credit?
How many have much relevant experience in credit at all?
How much better or worse are these numbers when asked of the record of the board?
The replies will amaze and horrify you.
What may also appal and baffle many of you is the scandal, the cynicism and the industrialised recklessness behind 20 years of the most unbelievable misconduct by banks, regulators, global law firms, big tech and so many more.
That’s all I will say for now, and I will stop digressing.
Now here’s my #METOO moment: God’s honour, I’ve been harassed in the workplace more than once. Men in banking, too, have been on the receiving end of sexual harassment and assaults.
Uncannily, uncomfortably familiar both these incidents were - and they gel with what we hear from the much-needed #METOO movement.
The workplace superior retains the upper hand and the victim’s mind is left racing.
When you work up the guts to tell a workmate bestie all about it over lunch – I also told the true tale of the first time; when I was doing call-centre work funded by the looted capital of a failed boom-time Australian bank – your mate laughs his head off.
And that is why we need the #METOO movement - to make it clear that this sort of behaviour, perpetrated mostly by men against women, is neither funny nor excusable.
Telling so much more of the story of Australian banking is what we’re on about here.
At work on Tuesday, over drinks with the sisters and the boys on Friday and then next week and then definitely forever – hold onto the ethos, the mandate and the magic of #METOO, #DESTROYTHEJOINT and March4Justice.
May we all live, bank and work happier and healthier all round.