Two workers at Raleigh Wells Fargo campus test positive for COVID-19

Two workers at a Wells Fargo campus in Raleigh have tested positive for COVID-19, the bank said.

The positive tests come after two other workers at the bank’s Customer Information Center in Charlotte tested positive for the disease caused by the new coronavirus, the bank said Tuesday. Another employee tested positive for the disease at a call center in Iowa.

The two worked at the Wells Fargo campus at 1100 Corporate Center Drive in west Raleigh. The first case, which Wells learned about on March 25, worked on the first floor of the campus’s building B, while the other, which Wells learned about yesterday, worked on the second floor of building A.

The campus houses a variety of bank functions, according to bank spokesman Josh Dunn.

The positive tests only add to the anxiety experienced across the country by bank workers who still go into the office. And as millions of Americans are out of work due to the pandemic, bank support functions like call centers are seeing record volume from customers in dire need of payment deferrals and fee waivers.

Many Wells Fargo workers are still going into work, including in call centers. As of this week, 35% of the workers in the Charlotte information center, which usually has 9,000 full-time employees, are still going in.

Wells Fargo’s COVID-19 efforts

The bank has amped up its cleaning and is enforcing social distancing, it said. They’ve even taken tape measures and made sure that call center workers are spaced at least six feet apart, Mary Mack, the bank’s Charlotte-based CEO of Consumer & Small Business Banking, told the Observer.

Wells Fargo is currently testing a pilot program to allow call center jobs to be done from home, Mack said. She expects the program to be rolled out for some call center workers in the “coming days and weeks.”

The bank has closed some branches in the pandemic, and limited hours at the ones that are still open. It’s also paying employees that it calls “front line” — like those in call centers — $200 more biweekly, as long as they are required to go into the office and make less than $100,000 a year.

This story was originally published April 1, 2020 at 6:17 PM.