PES Manifesto

Yourspace goes to the States: Protecting workers jobs and workers money

Published Friday, February 8, 2008 at 16:40
by Editor (783 views and 0 comments)

The PES delegation in the US have found strong agreement with Democrats on the need to do something about international financial markets, especially hedge and private equity funds.

These privately-owned funds are often exempt from the transparency and tax rules that apply to all other players in the financial markets! They are often involved in ‘leveraged buy outs’ where healthy companies are bought with borrowed money, the company is saddled with high debts and workers are laid off – or given worse working conditions - in a hunt for bigger profits. There is consensus on both sides of the Atlantic – at least between the PES and senior Democrats – that the lack of information about the activities of these funds is damaging for the stability of financial markets – and more importantly, on the pensions and savings of working families. Moreover it is clear that leveraged buy outs can be bad news for jobs and working conditions. With pension funds increasingly investing in private equity and hedge funds you have the absurd situation of workers’ money being used to buy companies and make workers redundant!

What Democrats and the PES agreed in Washington this week was to push this agenda forward in two different ways: first, to get pension funds on both sides of the Atlantic talking about this problem, second to get legislators discussing the gaps in regulation of hedge and private equity funds.

Tags: investment, PES, US elections, USA