What "Pitchfork Pat" (and you) can do for workers.

• Author: Waldman, Amy
• Position: Pat Buchanan

Rare is the Brooklyn pensioner who can say she changed the lives of thousands of workers, but Marie Walsh did just that. She didn't run for office or write articles. She merely inquired about where her pension money was invested.

In 1984, the trustees of the $70 billion New York City Comptroller pension funds were meeting to discuss the Sullivan principles, which guided corporate investment in South Africa. Walsh went to the meeting. Why, she asked the trustees, weren't they also looking at companies doing work in Northern Ireland, where Catholic workers were being heavily discriminated against? The trustees considered her question, and then investigated her charge. Soon after, they drew up the MacBride Principles, which insisted that American companies in Ireland halt discriminatory employment practices. They convinced other funds, state legislatures, and hundreds of companies to adopt the principles. Ultimately, the principles led to an anti-discrimination employment law in Britain.

What Walsh did--raising a question at a trustee meeting--is within the rights of every American with money invested in a pension fund. Yet few workers or pensioners exercise those rights; most Americans have no idea which companies they own stock in.

So American workers watch the nightly news and mutter about the layoffs from corporations; sometimes they themselves are laid off. The irony is that together, they own corporate America. More than 50 million Americans own stock, enough that if they exercised their rights and responsibilities as company owners, the results could be revolutionary.

The real players are the "institutional investors," such as public and private pension funds, and most workers have a stake in them. Pension funds alone owned 27 percent of all outstanding U.S. equities as of the end of 1994, according to The Brancato Report on Institutional Investment. Other institutional investors with ready-made constituencies among their shareholders include religious institutions such as the Catholic archdioceses; large foundations; and even some mutual funds set up specifically for stockholders in search of socially responsible investing. Most institutional investors are invested for the long haul--10 or 20 years--and their holdings are so large they can't do the "Wall Street walk" and quickly sell out. Their only hope of influence is to encourage or force a company to reform. They are long-term owners, not short-term traders,

It was the corporate...