To his way of thinking, the fact that people work "creates" money - to be honest I don't quite understand what he meant,
The idea of work "creating" money is not really accurate at all.
An example--one man can work a lot and another very little and the second man come out with more money. Clearly, it wasn't the work that generated the money, but rather the worth of what was created.
Another factor is the presence of someone with money willing to pay you for your work. Today's example would be the home builder. It takes a lot of work and is quite the skill to build a nice home, but if fewer and fewer people have money to buy a home, the home builder still makes no money. It's not that they don't want a nice home, just that they too have no money to pay him for his work. So, he can work all he wants and still have little or no money.
but then again I don't understand how businesses (and thus, their employees) are so dependent on the banking system.
I think this would be more accurate the other way around. It's banks that are dependent on the business world. If no one borrowed money, how would a bank survive? Well, it would survive as the do provide the service of housing/safekeeping the wealth of business/individuals, but they couldn't make a ton of money which is what they desire. To make lots of money, they have to loan our the money they're keeping and charge interest. It's not too difficult to persude someone to borrow you money as human nature is inclined to greed even if that someone didn't really NEED the money.
Next, they've convinced everyone to borrow money, but they don't have enough in the bank to keep lending. And, when you can't lend, you can't make money. So, they start lending money they DON'T have so that they're profits can be that much larger.
Now, say you're the small business who just wants to operate your one little store which you've owned for decades and you have no reason to borrow from the bank because you're making enough money to feed your family and you're not as greedy as the rest. Unfortunately, if you don't get with the game, borrow from the bank, open more stores, and become an increasingly larger operation, you won't be able to compete and will eventually be put out of business by the guys who are that greedy. So, now they banks have made it possible for the businesses to be dependent on THEM rather than the other way around.