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JPMorgan Chase boss Jamie Dimon wasn’t the only working stiff in Washington yesterday hoping to get a fair shake.
After taking his lumps during his second grilling on Capitol Hill over the bank’s $2 billion trading blunder, he was confronted by Adriana Vasquez, a 38-year-old janitor who says she earns $10,000 a year cleaning JPMorgan’s tower in Houston.
“Despite making billions last year, why do you deny the people cleaning your buildings a living wage?” Vasquez asked the bank chieftain at the end of his two-hour grilling before the House Financial Services Committee.
The 56-year-old Dimon was paid $23 million last year — not exactly “billions” — but he earns as much in four hours as Vasquez earns in a year.
As a member of the Service Employees International Union, Vasquez, who says she cleans 24 bathrooms on 11 floors of the bank building, is putting pressure on JPMorgan.
The union put out a press release in advance of the hearing, announcing that it would send Vasquez to confront Dimon over the issue of janitorial pay.
A JPMorgan spokeswoman told The Post that the bank is a tenant of the tower but doesn’t set pay for the janitors, who are hired by the building’s management.
Dimon, who was expecting to hear from the union, told Vasquez to call his office.
It was a bizarre end to a testy two-hour session in which lawmakers turned up the heat on Dimon over the trading loss, which reignited fears of risk-taking by Wall Street, and more bank bailouts.
The hearing followed last week’s quizzing by the Senate Banking Committee, which took it easier on the JPMorgan chief. In contrast, the House members came across as tougher than their Senate counterparts.
At one point, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) grew so heated that he yelled at Dimon for evading his questions.
“Mr. Dimon, please don’t filibuster,” Frank shouted before saying a half-hearted “sorry” to the committee chairman, Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.).
Dimon also sidestepped Frank’s question about whether his compensation could be “on the table” if the bank decides to claw back pay from executives responsible for the trading loss.
“My compensation is 100 percent up to my board,” Dimon said. “I can’t tell my board what to do.”
Despite the occasionally antagonistic questioning, members of the House failed to squeeze any additional information from Dimon about what went wrong or how to prevent future trading losses.
Dimon reiterated his concerns about the Dodd-Frank Act, the sweeping Wall Street overhaul passed in the wake of the financial crisis. “Parts of Dodd-Frank we supported. Parts of Dodd-Frank we didn’t,” he said.
Dimon’s star lost some of its shine when the bank acknowledged in May that a trader dubbed the “London Whale” in its Chief Investment Office had lost at least $2 billion on complex derivative trades. Dimon had earlier dismissed reports of the losses as a “tempest in a teapot.”
“On April 13th, I believed it was a tempest in the teapot,” Dimon said yesterday when questioned about the statement. “I obviously was dead wrong, and I deeply regret having said it.”