Organizations
Calling for Greater Social Responsibility
and Corporate Governance from TIAA-CREF:
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................................................................................................................................. Organization Name: United Students Against Sweatshops Organization
Name: Corporate
Accountability International (formarly Infact) 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 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 now seeking 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 "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 .................................................................................................................................
Organization Name: Citizen's
Coalition (Frente Civico pro Defensa del Casino de la Selva) 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: Educating
for Justice, Inc. .................................................................................................................................
Organization Name: Canadian
Committee To Combat Crimes Against Humanity Phone: (514) 387-0149 Web Site : http://www.comitecanadien.org , comitecanadien@cam.org , comitecanadien@voila.fr 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 ................................................................................................................................. Organization Name: Campaign to Stop Killer Coke/Corporate Campaign, Inc. Contact Information: Ray Rogers, Director, (718) 852-2808, stopkillercoke@aol.com Web site: 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.” 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: 1. 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); 2. 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. 3. Targeting individual executives and board members (several resignations of Coke executives and board members have already occurred), and 4. 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 ................................................................................................................................. Organization Name: Sprawl-Busters Contact
Information: Al Norman, founder. 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 |
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