How to Fight Private Equity and Win

Private equity firms control $6 trillion dollars in the United States alone, $2 trillion of which they have raised from public sector unions’ pension funds. These firms use workers’ capital to finance investments plagued by child labor, wage theft, abuse of migrant workers, and all manner of what the industry calls “Environmental, Social and Governance” risks. But the private equity model of wealth extraction creates opportunities for deep solidarity between public sector unions, private sector unions seeking to improve working conditions for their members and to organize the unorganized, environmental groups and other activists to “mitigate” ESG risks and in so doing pursue their vision for a more just and sustainable world. Learn how hospitality workers and other marginalized groups are fighting back against private equity and winning.

Susan Minato is the Co-President of UNITE HERE Local 11, a union representing more than 20,000 hospitality workers in Southern California.. She is also an International Vice President. Susan is a graduate of UCLA School of Law. She worked at the offices of the LA County Public Defender and the Inner City Law Center, which deals with habitability and safety issues for LA’s Skid Row residents. Later she worked as the staff attorney for the Utility Workers Union of America Local 132, representing The Gas Company workers in Southern California. Although interested in and challenged by the law, Susan was attracted to the power of worker organizing and direct action.She moved to UNITE HERE International Union in 1993 to pursue organizing. She accepted short posts in San Diego, Laughlin, and Las Vegas, Nevada, before moving to Los Angeles. Inspired by UNITE HERE’s leadership development program, she has spent the past 20 years organizing in the hospitality industry and training others to become leaders in a movement for social justice. Susan is a fourth generation Japanese American. Her family, which immigrated to California in 1888, worked as farmers and fishermen in the Los Angeles area and throughout the state before being incarcerated in internment camps in 1943. Susan lives in Northeast Los Angeles with her husband and two sons.

Jordan Fein is a Lead Research Analyst with UNITE HERE Local 11, the hospitality workers’ union in Southern California and Arizona. He has worked as a strategic campaigner based in Los Angeles for eight years, and before this worked in the same capacity for UNITE HERE Local 1 in Chicago for four years. His research has focused on private equity firms, public pension funds and other corporations and institutional investors that are active in the hospitality industry. He conducts industry, corporate, real estate and political research and analysis to develop and carry out campaigns focused on winning economic justice for low wage, primarily immigrant hospitality workers.