WIN Union Economy Desk: AFL-CIO Office of Investment Makes Investments Work for Workers

X post in Labor & GD

http://laborradio.org/2014/12/win-union-economy-desk-afl-cio-office-of-investment-makes-investments-work-for-workers/

Posted: December 30, 2014 by laborradio

By JoAnne Pow!ers

The AFL-CIO’s Office of Investment looks out for the interests of union members when they intersect with financial markets. One of their projects is Executive Paywatch, which they release every April, which looks at compensation of executives and how it compares to that for workers. Heather Slavkin-Corzo is Director of the Office of Investment:

[Heather Slavkin-Corzo]: “It’s fun and frightening at the same time. We publish comprehensive pay data for some of the largest public companies in the country, and we do a lot of work trying to draw attention to income inequality in particular when you look at the CEO to worker pay ratio.”

The Office also works on engaging with public companies as investors. Unions and union members have hundreds of billions of dollars invested in publicly traded companies:

[Heather Slavkin-Corzo]: “More than 560 billion dollars in Taft-Hartley and union-sponsored pension plans. If you add into that the amount of money that’s being invested in public pension plans on behalf of union members and that union members have invested in 401K plans, that number goes up by an order of magnitude. And, so, it’s our role to try to engage with companies to get them to improve their practices to make them better stewards of our retirement income.”

FULL story at link. Audio story here: https://soundcloud.com/laborradio/win-union-economy-desk-afl-cio-office-of-investment-makes-investments-work-for-workers