Big Labor Targets Wall Street

Wall Street investment firms beware: support President Bush's Social Security reform and run the risk of being targeted by big labor and losing their pension fund business. That's the clear message that labor unions are sending to Wall Street, in a hypocritical campaign aimed at crippling businesses support for the president's proposal of personal retirement accounts.

Charles Schwab was the latest victim of the AFL-CIO attacks, with the unions protesting outside Schwab offices in New York and all over the country yesterday. This follows similar protests against Edward Jones and Waddell & Reed, which eventually forced both firms to drop out of a business coalition that supports personal retirement accounts. The union pension-fund trustees have also started a letter-writing campaign, warning Wall Street that support for personal accounts could mean lost business for pension-fund managers.

But if ever there were a double standard, this campaign against Wall Street and personal retirement accounts certainly fits the bill. While trying to convince everybody else that markets are hazardous to investors, unions themselves are heavy investors in the stock market, controlling over $2 trillion dollars in assets between multi-employer pension funds and public employee pension funds.

So, while the union protesters were raising a ruckus yesterday outside Charles Schwab, their pension funds have significant portions of their assets directly invested in equities. Adding to the hypocrisy, the unions hire these same Wall Street firms to handle pension fund management for their retirees.

Unions, then, have no problem with the stock market or Wall Street - at least under the right circumstances. Why the double standard?

Union opposition to the president's plan is about politics and power. Politically, organized labor has cast its lot with the Democratic Party and is hesitant to do anything that might jeopardize that partnership. The Democratic Party is nearly united in opposition to the president's ideas, and it needs help from all of its allies to win this battle.

If the Democratic Party needs organized labor to go to bat for it, union leaders are happy to answer the call and earn valuable political capital.

The fight over Social Security, however, extends beyond politics and into the complex world of proxy voting. By owning thousands, sometimes even millions of shares of stock in companies, union pension funds and their allies control a significant number of shareholder votes at annual corporate meetings, often enough to influence corporate policy.

As a result, they are able to force votes on shareholder resolutions that may not be in the best interest of the company - but are labor-friendly. In this way, unions have used financial investment capital to change corporate behavior at a time when their actual membership continues to fall.

Personal retirement accounts could upset this whole scheme.

At the very least, with their ability to empower all Americans as investors, personal retirement accounts would put more players in the game, some of whom would not necessarily support union-friendly positions. In fact, it's even possible that conservatives could pool their money together and offer a counterweight to the pension funds and unions in the shareholder voting wars. One conservative pool already exists - the Free Enterprise Action Fund - and countless more could arise with the introduction of personal retirement accounts.

Personal retirement accounts also threaten "socially responsible investing" drives, which have been another favorite of organized labor in the past 10 years. Socially responsible investing encourages companies, instead of focusing on the traditional duty of maximizing financial performance, to take into consideration liberal social criteria such as environmental and human rights issues when making corporate policy. But with personal retirement accounts, investors might balk at socially responsible investing. People might like the idea of saving the redwoods, but not at the expense of their retirement money.

Unions certainly have a lot at stake in the Social Security debate, which explains why they have aggressively used their leverage over Wall Street to thwart momentum for personal retirement accounts.

But even if labor is successful in its effort, the general public - and especially dues paying union members - need to be aware of their hypocrisy. For union bosses, Wall Street is a great investment, as long as they control everything. Give individuals and union members some power over their investments and Wall Street turns into a rotten apple.

The union campaign has energy and a plan of attack, but it could still use a catchy slogan. Given the hypocrisy of their attacks, "Do as we say, not as we do," might fit the bill.

Mr. O'Keefe is a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute.