TIAA “Social Choice” Retirement Fund for Teachers is Anything But
Last year, I started organizing with a group of mostly New York-based professors, students, and environmental justice activists called TIAA Divest. Here’s why:
I’d known about this since September 2021, when I switched my 403b account to the so-called “Social Choice” retirement mutual fund. There is an option called a “brokerage window” for my 401k account (but not for my 403b, which my College requires to be invested in a designated set of mutual funds that all have fossil fuels corporations, arms dealers, and other bottom of the barrel capitalist ventures in them), and I toyed with expending the additional energy managing it, but yesterday decided it wasn’t worth the organizing opportunity cost of my time, and so I switched my 401k to TIAA’s “Social Choice” fund, too.
The automated email confirming the transfer from an even less socially conscious “2050 Fund” to “Social Choice” hit my inbox this morning. I made the mistake of going down the rabbit hole of looking at its Quarter 4 Portfolio Holdings. It made me want to punch something, but all I could do was send this irate “I want to speak to the manager!” (lol) email to their edelivery and media@tiaa.org addresses:
“Dear TIAA,
I’m so disappointed.
It’s so wildly unacceptable that your ‘Social Choice’ mutual fund contains pages and pages of fossil fuel companies including Chevron (which spends more lobbying the U.S. Congress than any other gas company), Gazprom and Lukoil. and Repsol (the Russian oligarchy corporations), Shaanxi Coal Industry and Yanzhou Coal Mining and Coal India (which is just irrational given coal’s looming obsolescence), Saudi Arabian Oil (women’s rights? Jamaal Khashoggi?), Royal Dutch Shell and ExonMobil and BP (oil spills), and Petroleo Brasiliero (aka corruption scandal-riddled PetroBras). I specifically called a local TIAA agent and asked for a fund without fossil fuels [in September] and he recommended this one to me. So not only is it deceptively named, people who work for you are actively telling falsehoods about it.
I will publish this on my blog. TIAA should be ashamed.
Sincerely,
Owen Silverman Andrews”
But that’s why we organize, right? Join us, especially if you work at a school that uses TIAA for retirement services: https://tiaa-divest.org/contact-tiaa-divest/.
Divestment is a powerful tool, especially when used in coordination with legislative advocacy (see my previous post on insufficient incrementalist and market-based legislative before the Baltimore City Council and 2/21 post on trash incineration subsidies before the Maryland General Assembly), direct action, alternative building, mutual aid, and other diverse tactics. So, yeah, I’m pissed off this morning halfway through my first cup of coffee, but that’s fuel for the movement.
