NEWS FROM THE CWC SECRETARIAT
CWC Conference
Registration opens next week for the 2018 Workers' Capital conference, to be held in San Francisco on September 10-11, 2018. We will circulate an announcement with the registration link.
This year, the conference will include a leadership course for trustees in addition to workshops and panels for union organizers and labour-nominated trustees. Organized by the CWC, the trustee leadership course is a collaboration between SHARE and the Harvard Kennedy School Trustee Leadership Forum. The CWC Conference will precede the PRI in Person, a UC Berkeley Labor Centre conference on just transition and the Global Climate Action Summit.
Shareholder Activism Working Group
Proxy Advisories
CWC participants urge funds to vote in support of following shareholder resolutions:
Campaigns Portal
The Shareholder Activism Working Group is inviting trade unions across the world to request our support in building shareholder activism and/or capital stewardship elements to their campaigns.The shareholder activism campaigns portal is now online. CWC participants can access the portal using the general website login information.
Workers' Capital in Action
We are profiling cases where the responsible investment of workers’ retirement savings helped improve or remedy violations of workers’ fundamental rights. Read our first profile, featuring the Network of Trustees for Responsible Investment (RAIR) and IRCANTEC in France working with UNITE HERE. Please feel free to contact uswith other examples you would like to share.
NEWS AND NOTES FROM CWC PARTICIPANTS
IndustriALL
International Transport Workers Federation (ITF)
The ITF welcomed a partial victory after the International Container Terminal Services, Inc.(ICTSI) signed a new agreement with PNG dock workers at Lae and Port Moresby. The ITF had issued a letter to shareholders recommending a vote against ICTSI directors at the company’s AGM on April 19, 2018.
LiUNA
Australia
The ACTU has submitted an update on its activities to CWC participants. As described in the full update, which is available here, the ACTU has been active on several fronts: engaging with superannuation funds with exposure to XPO Logistics through Orbis Investment Management and/or Allen Grey, ongoing capital stewardship organizing for Aerocare workers, divestment from all aspects of the asbestos supply chain, responding to capital strategies requests concerning Partners Group and supporting theSEC mandatory disclosure of payments to governments by resource extraction companies.
Canada
United Kingdom
Unite the Union has released a statement on the GKN bid. During the GKN bid, hedge funds were estimated to have influence over around 25% of the company’s shares. Many of them had built their stake using derivatives, meaning that they were able to influence the outcome of the bid without holding shares. The narrow margin of Melrose’s victory shows that hedge funds were critical to the success of the bid, despite having a very short-term focus. A number of them were merger arbitrage funds that were shorting Melrose whilst simultaneously advocating that GKN shareholders accepted its bid.
United States
The AFL-CIO invites you to sign an investor letter to Mondelēz International, whose offshoring of jobs has tarnished the company’s iconic Nabisco brands such as the Oreo cookie. Mondelēz moved 600 Nabisco factory workers’ jobs from Chicago, Illinois to Salinas, Mexico in 2016. The letter urges Mondelēz to bargain in good faith with its workforce, raise up wages and productivity on both sides of the border, and ensure that rights are respected and protected.
Investors can co-sign the letter by contacting brees@aflcio.org or filling out this Google form by Tuesday, May 15. The letter will be delivered on May 16th at the company's shareholder meeti.
The SEIU Master Trust and the CtW Investment Group have jointly filed a proposal calling on Amazon.com’s board of directors to implement a “Rooney Rule”: requiring that the initial list of candidates from which new management-supported director nominees are chosen should include (but need not be limited to) qualified women and minority candidates. Read more here.
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