Big ESG’s Big Partner: Big Labor

My colleague Robert Stilson details the extent and trends in the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) movement in general through a review of the annual Proxy Preview 2025 review of shareholder resolutions published by the ESG activist group As You Sow. I would like to focus on the contributions of one major faction of the ESG coalition and what it reveals about that faction.

Yes, say it with me: “Big Labor is Everything Leftism and Everything Leftism is Big Labor.” ESG is no exception, and the Proxy Preview 2025 reveals the extent to which Big Labor is entwined in ESG activism, even beyond its usual demands for easier union organization. In 2025 alone, the AFL-CIO demanded that Best Buy, Lowes, and Tractor Supply Company each generate a “LGBTQIA+ nondiscrimination report” and the SEIU demanded a “racial equity audit” at MasterCard.

Pensions for Politics

While “ESG” might be a relatively new term that rose to prominence in the 2020s, Big Labor using its members’ pension investments for boardroom politics is not new. In the 1990s, the AFL-CIO under Democratic Socialists of America member John Sweeney created the Center for Working Capital, which rated money managers on their votes on shareholder resolutions. The AFL-CIO planned to use the stick of elimination from consideration for managing union pension funds to impel financial firms to vote on corporate shareholder resolutions in a manner favorable to union interests.

Around the same time, union-backed commissioners and political figures took control of California’s state-employee pension fund CalPERS. Then-state Treasurer Phil Angelides (D) vowed to “mobilize the power of the capital markets for public purpose,” making investment allocations based on ideological principles.

By the late 2000s, union pension funds were aligning with the interests of environmentalist groups. As Ivan Osorio wrote for Capital Research Center back in 2008: “To win green support, unions are proposing to leverage their member pension funds to push for policies favored by the environmental establishment—to the detriment of rank-and-file union pension holders.” Union bosses and their political allies have been playing ideological games with members’ pension funds for decades, making them pioneers in ESG investing before “ESG” was the name for it.

“Social” Means “Union”

Unions’ principal interest in the ESG activism movement is on the “S” or “social” prong of the acronym. Both unions themselves, like the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, and critics of unions, like the Institute for the American Worker, will argue that Big Labor views ESG as a category for advancing union organizing and other core union priorities.

Proxy Preview shows unions and union-aligned groups (like city and state pension funds and the largely union-owned and union-controlled Amalgamated Bank) pushing shareholder resolutions demanding that companies “adopt a noninterference policy respecting freedom of association” or “respect for freedom of association and collective bargaining”—euphemisms for neutrality in union organizing. Under a neutrality agreement, the employer agrees not to present its views on the potential consequences of union organizing to employees, and it may agree not to confirm union majority support by a government-supervised secret-ballot election, instead using public union-card signatures (known as “card check”).

Unions can also use pension funds’ ESG activities to promote their organizing and contract campaigns. Proxy Preview shows SOC Investment Group, an investment entity that works with the SEIU-led Strategic Organizing Center, pushing “workplace health and safety audits” at various fast-food chains that, totally coincidentally I’m sure, the SEIU has tried or is trying to unionize. Adopting such a proposal would highlight alleged problems the SEIU would present to prospective new union members and essentially compel the companies to do the SEIU’s opposition research for it.

Conclusion

The Proxy Preview shows how the broader liberal movement includes Big Labor and shows Big Labor’s participation in the broader liberal movement. In previous years, there have been even closer ties between unions and the other arms of the ESG movement. In 2024, the Teamsters filed a more environmental proposal against Amazon demanding the company produce a report on its compliance with international “just transition” guidelines. As mentioned at the top here, multiple unions pushed diversity, equity, and inclusion–related proposals in the Proxy Preview 2025. As some conservatives push a misguided partnership with organized labor, the Proxy Preview raises yet another major red flag.