Should public pensions invest in Uber and Lyft? Sure, says the man who pushed to divest in guns
When Uber and Lyft began trading on Wall Street as idealistic, tech-disrupting startups, some of their earliest investment came from the nation’s largest public pension funds.
Since then, their reputations have become less wholesome: Not long ago, an alliance of Uber and Lyft drivers wrote the California Teachers’ Retirement System, cautioning against investment in companies that exploit workers and destabilize the tax base, as critics say the sharing economy has done.
CALmatters took the questions posed by Gig Workers Rising and Mobile Workers Alliance in their letter (embedded below) to former state Treasurer and Controller John Chiang, who got CalSTRS to agree to work toward divesting in an earlier set of alleged corporate bad guys, gun manufacturers and dealers. (The California Public Employees’ Retirement System declined.)
Chiang knows the issues well. For private workers without retirement security, he championed the CalSavers program to set up retirement savings accounts for low-wage workers. During his unsuccessful bid for governor, he championed affordable housing and backed Medicare for all.