PEP, May 2005: Labor targets Wall Street

By GREGORY N. HEIRES

DC 37 retirees and members hit the streets March 31 to press Wall Street money managers to oppose President Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security.

They joined thousands of union activists in noontime demonstrations throughout the nation during an AFL-CIO-sponsored “Day of Action” in 70 cities.

The New York protestors rallied at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Battery Park, where investment firm CEO Charles Schwab was being honored at a luncheon. Their signs carried messages such as “Social Security, Fix It, Don’t Privatize it” and “$chwab: Don’t Rob Our Social Security.”

“We are telling the titans of Wall Street to keep their hands off Social Security,” said Bruce Raynor, president of Unite Here, at the rally.

“They are trying to take away our Social Security benefit, and we are going to fight it,” DC 37 retiree Iona Allen said. About 200 demonstrators gathered outside the hotel. Many of the protests targeted Charles Schwab Corp. and the Wachovia Corp. bank because of their affiliation with the so-called Alliance for Worker Retirement Security. The business-backed group supports privatization.

“We want Schwab and Wachovia and Wall Street to know that they will not get away with it,” said AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, who led a contingent of protestors from the national labor federation’s headquarters near the White House to a nearby Schwab office and then to a Wachovia Corp. branch. AWRS is among a number of groups with ties to the financial industry that have pledged to spend up to $70 million to support Bush’s privatization effort, according to the AFL-CIO.

Ms. Allen called Bush’s talk of Social Security going broke a ruse to raise Wall Street profits by shifting retirement funds to private accounts managed by investment companies.

Representing millions of workers who together have $400 billion in pension dollars, the labor movement asks money managers to remain neutral in the political fight over the future of Social Security. Bill Patterson, director of the AFL-CIO Office of Investment, said it is a conflict of interest for investment firms to donate money to the groups promoting privatization.

Earlier this year, pressure from unions led the financial firms Waddell & Reed Financial Inc. and Edwards D. Jones & Co. to withdraw from the alliance. “They are feeling the heat,” said DC 37 Executive Director Lillian Roberts.

Republican Rep. John A. Boehner, chair of the House Education and Workforce Committee, has pressed the Labor Dept. to investigate the union campaign. He claims it is a secondary boycott, violating the U.S. labor laws that ban unions from boycotting parties not directly involved in labor disputes.

An AFL-CIO spokesperson called Boehner’s demand as an attempt to “punish workers and their unions for exercising their First Amendment rights.”