> I would really like to hear a list of Alinsky-style community
> organizing successes. As far as I can tell, it's done nothing to
> resist, much less reverse, the successful class war from above of the
> last 25 years. Ditto shareholder activism, which has been great for
> the owners, but not so great for the workers.
You see the following article in Tuesday's WSJ? At SEIU, leveraging pension fund assets has been instrumental in getting employers to assent to private election agreements, whose rules are far more favorable for workers than the law under the NLRA.
Social Security Change Faces Labor Muscle AFL-CIO Investment Official Uses Heft of Pension Assets To Influence Wall Street's Views By JEANNE CUMMINGS Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL March 22, 2005; Page A4 WASHINGTON
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The weapon is the leverage labor has with business from the $400 billion in collectively bargained pension assets that union officials invest. When Mr. Patterson launched the investment office to unify strategy for labor-pension assets in 1996, he promptly posted on the Internet the pay packages of chief executives of major corporations. In 2002, amid burgeoning business scandals, he organized labor-fund trustees and shareholders to oppose the re-election of Enron Corp. directors to other corporate boards; three of them, including Wendy Gramm, the wife of former Republican Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, subsequently quit various boards.
Later that year, unions successfully pressed the Securities and Exchange Commission to require mutual funds to disclose proxy votes and the reasoning behind them. Now Mr. Patterson probes for ways to push financial firms away from supporting the White House plan to overhaul Social Security through private investment accounts. The AFL-CIO opposes carving out a portion of Social Security revenue to finance those accounts, fearing that would undermine the current system, which has already been factored into negotiated retirement-benefit plans.
Mr. Patterson's tactics begin quietly with an exchange of letters, but can escalate quickly into old-fashioned, noisy street demonstrations. Next week, the AFL-CIO plans more protests in California, Pennsylvania and elsewhere outside the offices of Charles Schwab Corp. and Wachovia Corp., which both belong to lobbying coalitions backing Mr. Bush's Social Security approach. Schwab itself hasn't endorsed the president's call for private accounts and considers the protesters "misdirected," says spokesman Greg Gable. But Mr. Patterson, noting Schwab's continued donations to a pro-Bush coalition, responds: "They can't insist they are neutral when they are members of an advocacy organization dedicated to privatizing Social Security."
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