Organizations Calling for Greater Social Responsibility and Corporate Governance from TIAA-CREF
Organization Name : United Students Against Sweatshops
United Students Against Sweatshops is a student run and student led organization made up of affiliate groups on more than 250 college, university, and high school campuses throughout the US and Canada. Affiliate groups organize to use their power as students to ensure that their universities adopt policies and take actions that support those who are organizing to challenge oppression in their workplaces and their communities. While students focus on many different campaigns, the campaign that is most relevant to the work of this coalition is the campaign to ensure that Coca-Cola takes responsibility for its human rights abuses in Colombia, India, Turkey, Indonesia, Guatemala, and around the world. If you would like to get more involved, please visit our website at www.studentsagainstsweatshops.org or send an email to organize@usasnet.org
Organization Name : Corporate Accountability International (formarly Infact)
Contact Information : Patti Lynn, Campaign Director, 617-695-2525, plynn@stopcorporateabuse.org
Web Site : www.stopcorporateabuse.org
Description : Since 1977, Corporate Accountability International has been exposing life-threatening abuses by transnational corporations and organizing successful grassroots campaigns to hold corporations accountable to consumers and society at large. Corporate Accountability International is a non-profit, national membership organization building an active, aware public and a core of well-trained organizers to lead the grassroots challenge to unwarranted corporate influence.
Through the Tobacco Industry Campaign, launched in 1993, Corporate Accountability International is pressuring Altria/Philip Morris to stop addicting new young customers around the world, and to stop interfering in public policy on issues of tobacco and health. Altria/Philip Morris is one of TIAA-CREF’s largest institutional and mutual fund investors. The TIAA-CREF and Altria/Philip Morris also share a board member, Elizabeth Bailey, Professor of Business Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.
"Recent figures show that TIAA-CREF is one of Altria/Philip Morris’s largest investors, with over $800 million in mutual funds. For years, CREF shareholders have filed resolutions calling on CREF to begin an orderly divestment of all tobacco investments. Now is the time for the company’s new leadership to take these steps, and help TIAA-CREF live up to the corporate image its trying to create for itself." -Patti Lynn
Organization Name : Social Choice for Social Change : Campaign for a New TIAA-CREF
Contact Information : Neil Wollman, Co-Coordinator, 260-982-5346, nwollman@bentley.edu
Web Site : http://www.maketiaa-crefethical.org/SocialChoiceForSocialChange.html
Description: "We successfully lobbied TIAA-CREF to establish a socially responsible fund and then to modify it to not only exclude certain industries, like tobacco and heavy polluters, but to take the positive features of companies into account when making investments. We are nowseeking for them to invest in enterprises that will make direct influences in peoples' lives, like low-income housing and venture capital for producing socially and environmentally responsible products and services." - Neil Wollman
Organization Name : Press for Change
Contact Information : Jeff Ballinger, 617 494 5106, jeffreyd@mindspring.com
Description : Workers in Nike contract factories have continued to make demands on abusive factory managers, but there has been little meaningful change. Just six weeks ago, several thousand Nike workers protested at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta because the sports shoe giant is withdrew orders from a factory (PT Doson) which employed 7,000 workers. Independent union leaders in Indonesia believe that Doson's workforce was singled out because workers had stood up resolutely to Doson management. TIAA-CREF should immediately drop Nike from their investment accounts and undertake serious research on the issue of overseas apparel production.
"Along with the much needed attention that corporate financial irresponsibility has been given recently, it is equally important that focus is given to corporate social irresponsibility. Nike is a classic case of such irresponsibility and this is no more evident than in their dealings with the women and men at PT Doson in Indonesia." - Jeff Ballinger
Organization Name : 50 Years Is Enough Network/World Bank Bonds Boycott
Contact Information : Sameer Dossani, 202 IMF BANK (463 2265)
Web Site : http://econjustice.net/wbbb/, www.50years.org
Description : The World Bank Bonds Boycott is an international grassroots campaign that is building moral, political, and financial pressure on the World Bank. The World Bank raises most of its funds by issuing bonds. Ordinary people, through their pension funds, labor unions, churches, municipalities, and universities are exerting pressure for change on the World Bank by refusing to buy its bonds. The campaign demands an end to the World Bank's harmful "structural adjustment" policies; 100% debt cancellation; and an end to environmentally destructive projects, especially for oil, gas, mining, and dams.
Organization Name : Citizen's Coalition (Frente Civico pro Defensa del Casino de la Selva)
Contact Information : Email us at fcpcdls@yahoo.com, madretierra7@avantel.net.mx
Website : www.laneta.apc.org/procasino/ and www.frentecivico.org
Description : We are a group of citizens from Cuernavaca, Mexico, conformed of artists, families, workers ecologists, and academics. We have been beaten and jailed for protesting against the destruction of an environmentally, economically, and culturally important site in our city. Two years ago, on June 30, 2001, we created our organization, called Frente Civico, to defend murals, centenary trees, a 3500 year Olmec archeological site and our way of life. The heritage was found in the hotel "Casino de la Selva" now demolished to make way for two giant warehouses. Cuernavaca is ideal for rest and a tourist attraction. With the loss of the urban forest that was there and historic sites we will lose air quality, tranquility and tourism based jobs. We request that TIAA-CREF divest from Costco, an unethical company that flagrantly breaks the law and that has gone to the extreme of sustaining fascist policies in our country. Please visit www.procasino.org to promote our boycott called for until the company closes the stores.
Organization Name : Team Sweat
Contact Information : Jim Keady, Captain, 732.988.7322, Email us at info@teamsweat.org
Website : www.teamsweat.org
Description : TEAM SWEAT is an international coalition of consumers, investors and workers committed to ending the injustices in Nike's sweatshops around the world.
Organization Name : Canadian Committee To Combat Crimes Against Humanity
Contact Information : 3-220, de Beauharnois Street West, Montreal (Quebec) Canada, H2N 1K2
Phone : (514) 387-0149
Website : http://www.comitecanadien.org and comitecanadien@voila.fr. Email us at comitecanadien@cam.org
Description : The CCCCH is a non-profit organization, not partisan, which gives people a voice to understand and shape the laws which affect their lives. The CCCCH engages people in the civic process, by using the Internet to disseminate alternative information, raising the public conscience on the crimes committed by the application of neoliberal policies. The CCCCH has the mandate to use all the legal means to bring the responsible of economic crimes to a court under the charge of crimes against humanity, to advance the understanding of corporate accountability, human rights, labor rights, social and environmental justice issues. Among its goals is the creation of a an international court for crimes against humainity.
CCCCH has led along with the Frente Civico in Mexico, the boycott efforts vs Costco corporation for the barbaric acts commited against mexican society and world heritage. As part of the coalition it has helped inform professors and other academic personel of the activities of the organization.
Organization Name : National Community Reinvestment Coalition
Contact Information : John Taylor, President & CEO, 202-628-8866, Email us at jtaylor@ncrc.org
Website : http://www.NCRC.org
Description : The National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) is America’s trade association for community-based, non-profit organizations (NGOs and SCOs) working to promote wealth-building in low wealth population in the US and abroad. NCRC utilizes banking and consumer laws and regulations to leverage the private financial services sector to lend and invest un underserved neighborhoods. NCRC trains community leaders (CDCs, CDFIs, CDCUs, others), government officials, and lenders to understand how to build and influence bank lending and investments. NCRC’s National Institute for Economic Equality provides a comprehensive curriculum to accomplish this objective. NCRC owns and operates the National Center for Economic Justice (NCEJ) in Washington, DC which not only houses NCRC’s programs but those of many NCRC members and collaborators. The NCEJ also provides a state-of-the-art audio/video conference training center that allows NCRC to produce broadcast quality DVDs and tapes, streaming videos, and more, that allow such trainings to be distributed nationally and internationally. NCRC’s policy work before the US Congress and the Federal Bank Regulatory agencies, is well know in the United States for its effectiveness. NCRC and its members are the leading advocates in the fight to erase predatory or extortionist lending. We also operate the nations most well-known financial literacy and consumer rescue funds. Finally, NCRC is working to promote economic justice abroad as well and has partnered with non-government organizations in some 20 other nations to share information and experiences.
Organization Name : Campaign to Stop Killer Coke/Corporate Campaign, Inc.
Contact Information : Ray Rogers, Director, (718) 852-2808, Email us at stopkillercoke@aol.com
Website : www.killercoke.org
Description : The Campaign to Stop Killer Coke represents SINALTRAINAL, a Colombian union that represents workers in Coca-Cola bottling plants. The International Labor Rights Fund and the United Steelworkers of America filed a lawsuit against The Coca-Cola Co. and its Colombian bottlers in 2001 on behalf of SINALTRAINAL, several of its members and the survivors of Isidro Gil, one of its murdered officers. The lawsuit charges that Coca-Cola bottlers “contracted with or otherwise directed paramilitary security forces that utilized extreme violence and murdered, tortured, unlawfully detained or otherwise silenced trade union leaders.”s
In January 2004, New York City Council Member Hiram Monserrate led a delegation that included local representatives from the AFT, AFSCME, and the CWA on a 10-day, fact-finding tour to Colombia to investigate allegations of human rights violations by Coca-Cola. The delegation issued a scathing report in April concluding that “Coca-Cola is complicit in human rights abuses of its workers in Colombia.” (The full report and other supporting information can be read by going to www.killercoke.org and clicking on the Monserrate report and appendices.)
The worldwide Campaign to Stop Killer Coke is mobilizing widespread support to pressure The Coca-Cola Co. to protect the safety and rights of the workers and to compensate the victims of the company’s complicity in human rights abuses.
The overall strategy entails:
- Mounting a threat to the image that Coca-Cola has spent billions of dollars and decades to create. “Coke’s decision not to investigate possible union-related murders at its bottlers in Colombia has become a public-relations nightmare.” (Fortune magazine, May 31, 2004);
- Cutting out key markets of Coca-Cola. Nine colleges and universities have removed and banned Coke products from their campuses and many labor unions and other groups have taken similar actions.
- Targeting individual executives and board members (several resignations of Coke executives and board members have already occurred), and
- Challenging Coke’s major financial allies (SunTrust Banks, Royal Bank of Canada), and winning institutional shareholder support.
(See NYCERS/NYCTRS proxy resolution at http://www.killercoke.org/nycerslet.pdf.)
Organization Name : Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood
Contact Information : Josh Golin, Program Manager, 617-278-4172; Email us at jgolin@jbcc.harvard.edu
Web Site: http://www.commercialfreechildhood.org
Description: The Campaign For A Commercial-Free Childhood (formerly Stop Commercial Exploitation of Children) is a national coalition of health care professionals, educators, advocacy groups and concerned parents who counter the harmful effects of marketing to children through action, advocacy, education, research, and collaboration among organizations and individuals who care about children. CCFC supports the rights of children to grow up – and the rights of parents to raise them – without being undermined by rampant consumerism.
In the midst of an epidemic of childhood obesity, Coca-Cola continues to target children with their products. Despite their claims that they do not advertise to children to children under twelve, Coke designs toys for young children, markets their products extensively in schools to children of all ages, and it’s product placement is ubiquitous on American Idol, the number one rated show for children. Coca-Cola lobbies extensively against polices that policies that would help combat childhood obesity (such as prohibitions on vending machines in schools) and even denies the obvious truth that soda is contributing to health problems for children.
TIAA-CREF has substantial holdings in Coca-Cola.
Organization Name : Sprawl-Busters
Contact Information: Al Norman, founder.
Web Site : http://www.sprawl-busters.com/. Email us at info@sprawl-busters.com
Description : Sprawl-Busters, founded in 1993, is a grassroots clearinghouse on information and strategies for citizens groups fighting the encroachment of "big box" retail corporations like Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Target, and Costco. Forbes magazine has called Norman "Wal-Mart's #1 Enemy." The group's website, sprawl-busters.com, provides stories from across the globe of citizens' organizing efforts to stop retail sprawl, and offers resources like books, films and articles to help win that battle.
"Sprawl-Busters calls on TIAA-CREF to divest its stock in companies like Wal-Mart and Costco, which ignore the needs and aspirations of local communities, destroy local sustainable economies, and profit from the widespread exploitation of their own workers. " - Al Norman