Confronting the Private Equity Threat to Workers, Patients, and Communities

WHEREAS private equity firms have bought their way into nearly every corner of American life, today owning or controlling hospitals, child care centers, nursing homes, rental housing, retail chains, and workplaces across every sector, with the industry now controlling more than $11 trillion in assets and employing roughly one out of every twelve American workers, meaning a few thousand Wall Street executives now hold power over the jobs, paychecks, and working conditions of millions of families; and

WHEREAS the private equity playbook is simple: buy a company with borrowed money, pile the debt onto the company itself, charge it fees, pay yourself dividends, and cut whatever it takes to make the numbers work, starting with jobs, wages, staffing, and benefits, a model that researchers and watchdogs like the Private Equity Stakeholder Project have documented produces layoffs, closures, and bankruptcies wherever it goes; and

WHEREAS the destruction of Toys “R” Us showed the country exactly what this model does to working people: private equity owners buried the company in debt, collected nearly half a billion dollars in fees, and walked away when it collapsed, leaving 33,000 workers without jobs or severance, until those workers organized, took their fight to Wall Street’s doorstep, and forced the firms to pay; and

WHEREAS the same story has played out at Sears, at Claire’s, and at dozens of other chains, with private equity-owned retailers behind an estimated 130,000 lost retail jobs in 2016 and 2017 alone, the majority of all retail job losses in those years; and the same firms have turned the roof over our heads into a Wall Street commodity, buying up single-family homes by the tens of thousands, apartment complexes across the country, and the mobile home parks that are the last affordable option for many seniors and working families, where corporate owners have doubled lot rents, piled on junk fees, and turned to eviction far more readily than the landlords they replaced; and

WHEREAS while workers lost jobs and families paid ever higher rents, private equity created more than 400 billionaires in the last twenty years, helping make finance the single largest source of billionaire wealth on Earth, and allowing Blackstone founder Stephen Schwarzman alone to amass a fortune of roughly $44 billion and pay himself more than $1.2 billion in 2025; and

WHEREAS the cost of this greed is counted in human lives, with researchers estimating more than 20,000 additional deaths in private equity-owned nursing homes over a twelve-year span, and studies in the nation’s leading medical journals finding more patient falls, more infections, and worse care after private equity takes over a hospital; and

WHEREAS Steward Health Care became the face of this crisis when it collapsed in 2024, after its private equity owner Cerberus Capital Management walked away with roughly $800 million in profit while Steward’s chief executive bought himself a $40 million yacht, left workers and vendors unpaid, shuttered community hospitals, and was held in criminal contempt by the United States Senate, one of nine private equity-owned health care companies to file for bankruptcy in the first half of 2024 alone; and

WHEREAS Prospect Medical Holdings ran the same playbook on Waterbury Hospital, Manchester Memorial Hospital, and Rockville General Hospital, selling the land out from under them, draining them for years, and filing for bankruptcy in January 2025, while caregivers kept showing up through it all to hold together the hospitals that serve nearly one-third of our state’s residents; and

WHEREAS every one of these stories ends the same way, with the investors enriched and the workers and communities left having to pay to repair the wreckage, proving that extraction is not an abuse of the private equity model but the model itself, and that it cannot be reformed, only stopped; so

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the CT AFL-CIO and its affiliates will leverage their resources to support legislation that challenges private equity in every industry where it operates in this state; publicly disclosing who really owns our employers, limiting the debt investors may pile onto acquired companies, banning sale-leaseback and dividend schemes that strip assets from the institutions working people depend on, and holding private equity firms responsible for the wages, severance, and pensions owed to workers, and ultimately, a total ban on private equity ownership or investment in certain sectors; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the CT AFL-CIO and its affiliates commit to educating, organizing, and mobilizing our members to fight private equity, because the workers at Toys “R” Us proved that working people who stand together can force even the richest firms on Wall Street to answer to them, and because the decade long ordeal with Prospect Medical Holdings here in Connecticut proves a union contract remains the strongest protection any worker has when private equity comes for their workplace; and

BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED that the CT AFL-CIO and its affiliates commit to mobilizing our full political, legislative, and public capacity, alongside patients, tenants, parents, and community allies, to expose, oppose, and drive private equity profiteering out of the industries that Connecticut’s working families depend on.

Submitted by: Dave Hannon, CHCA District 1199, NUHHCE, AFSCME

Convention Action: APPROVE REJECT