Pension Divestment Statement

The Minnesota Association of Professional Employees calls on federal and state elected officials to do everything in their power to ensure a ceasefire is reached and maintained in Israel’s war on Gaza. As a union of state workers, we should be supporting health care and education, not war and occupation. 

We call on the Minnesota State Board of Investment to divest immediately from financial assets which provide material assistance for violations of human rights and international law. This genocide has been supported not just through our tax dollars and US military aid, but also through investments from our state pension system, which has invested in direct loans— bonds—to the Israeli government and in arms suppliers for the Israeli military. These investments, purportedly made for the benefit of public workers vested in the pension system, contradict our values as a union and as state workers committed to serving the public. The State Board of Investment has incorporated political and moral considerations into their investment decisions in the past, such as its divestment from apartheid South Africa in the 1980s. The situation unfolding in the Middle East demands that the State of Minnesota rise to the occasion again. We ask other public sector unions and workers in the state of Minnesota to join us in our demand to incorporate human rights considerations in state pension investments. 

Our solidarity must extend to all workers and their families, not just in Minnesota or the United States, but across the world. An injury to one is an injury to all.