Rank-and-file members of several New York City unions have launched campaigns to divest two of the city’s biggest pension funds from Israeli securities. The members allege the Teachers’ Retirement System of the City of New York (TRSNYC) and the New York City Employees’ Retirement System (NYCERS) have invested $100 million and $115 million, respectively, in Israeli companies and government bonds. 

“We should really have some kind of say over how [our pension] is invested,” said Emily Sun, a founding member of City Workers for Palestine and a rank-and-file member of DC 37, a union representing 150,000 city employees and 89,000 retirees. “Related to that is the moral position of ‘Do I want my retirement to be funded by the blood of Palestinians?’” 

Sun has been involved in City Workers for Palestine’s campaign to divest NYCERS from Israeli securities since January. NYCERS is the fifth-largest public pension fund in the nation and serves more than 300,000 retired city workers. 

Sun said that she and other DC 37 members have tried to introduce divestment and ceasefire resolutions to DC 37 union meetings several times but have faced pushback from other union members and leadership. 

Actions against these resolutions, Sun said, have included “filibustering to the point of losing quorum” and local leadership insisting that a divestment resolution would be illegal or scare off potential union members. Sun recalled an incident where a City Workers for Palestine member brought up a NYCERS divestment petition signed by 600 people at a local meeting, only for the president to start screaming, “Mute her! Mute her!”

“There have been a lot of very undemocratic practices that have sort of coalesced around this particular issue,” Sun said. 

Union members organizing for divestment have also struggled to gain traction among union members. The delegate assembly of one of the NYC educators’ unions—the Professional Staff Congress of the City University of New York (PSC-CUNY) system—voted on May 23 against a resolution supporting BDS in the CUNY system. Additionally, Chris Harding, a Rank and File Action member at PSC-CUNY, noted that PSC-CUNY leadership has been “very aggressive against any organizing to do with Palestine” because they believe it will weaken their position in contract negotiations with CUNY. 

Despite the difficulties they faced in their campaign to divest NYCERS, one union became one of the first in the nation to pass divestment and ceasefire resolutions on June 17. The Association of Legislative Employees, representing approximately 400 New York City Council employees, endorsed the City Workers for Palestine campaign calling for NYCERS to divest from Israeli bonds and holdings. 

Musarrat Lamia, a member of the ALE solidarity committee, the group that authored the divestment resolutions, hoped that it could lead the way for other unions as well. “We want our retirement funds and our pension funds to be ethically sourced and representative of the world that we want to live in once we reach our retirement,” Lamia said. 

The United Federation of Teachers (UFT) has also joined PSC-CUNY in a campaign to divest their pension fund TRSNYC from Israeli securities using research methods that rank-and-file members of unions such as DC 37 established to investigate their pension funds. 

TRSNYC, a subsidiary of the larger Teachers’ Retirement System, provides retirement funds to public school educators across NYC. Educators’ unions, such as UFT and PSC-CUNY, began publicly calling for the pension fund to divest in April. Together, the two unions represent about 220,000 educators across New York City. 

Like DC 37 members, the two unions have also staged rallies in front of pension fund board meetings and created an internal petition to divest their pension. 

A working group of approximately 25 UFT and PSC-CUNY educators formed in May found that the pension had at least $100 million invested in Israeli companies alone, according to Harding.

That estimate, Harding said, does not include all companies profiting from or enabling the ongoing genocide in Gaza. He said the working group voted to only include Israeli companies in its divestment demands in order to “isolate Israel further so it’s forced into negotiations and to end the occupation.”

The Israeli companies in which the group found its pension had invested ranged from the “super mundane” to the “pretty damn evil,” Harding said. 

“A lot of the companies we’ve found have connections to settlements in the West Bank,” Harding said. One such company, a supermarket chain called Rami Levy, operates in illegal West Bank settlements. The U.N.’s top court recently reaffirmed that Israel’s settlements in the Palestinian territories are illegal and must be dismantled.

TRSNYC also invests in companies more directly tied to the Israeli military, including NICE Systems Limited, a company that produces surveillance technologies used against Palestinians; Rafael Advanced Defense System and Elta Systems, two arms firms based in Israel; ICL Group Limited, which supplies white phosphorus to the Israeli military; and more.

The divestment of pension funds from foreign countries is not without precedent. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the TRSNYC pension fund divested from Russian securities. Harding noted that it took only two weeks for the pension fund to divest then. Theoretically, TRSNYC board members could commit to divesting from Israeli securities in the same timeframe. 

“It could happen in two weeks,” Harding said. “It won’t, but it could.”

Pension funds have also notably divested from fossil fuel companies in the past several years and South Africa in the 1980s to protest the country’s apartheid system. However, New York and several other states have anti-BDS laws: statutes that not only prevent public funds from participating in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which calls for companies to withdraw financial support to Israel, but prevent public funds from investing in companies that support the BDS campaign. 

According to Sun and Harding, the anti-BDS laws should not apply to NYCERS and TRSNYC since the funds comprise workers’ money rather than state funds. Other state-funded pension funds, such as the state teachers’ pension system, do have to contend with state legislation.

Divestment has been a major focus for unions and nationwide student protests calling on colleges to divest from Israel. Students formed an encampment in April at City College, within the CUNY system, that urged PSC-CUNY educators to support their calls for CUNY’s divestment and endorse calls for TRS to divest. 

PSC-CUNY wrote to Prism that it has no official position on divestment. UFT and DC 37 leadership did not respond to requests for comment. 

The student movement has galvanized the Palestinian movement, including among union workers, said Ilona Nanay, a founding member of NYC Educators for Palestine, an ad hoc group within UFT, and a member of the Movement of Rank-and-File Educators steering committee at UFT.

“It really feels like there’s been a level of politicization, radicalization, and consciousness-raising around Palestinian liberation,” Nanay said. 

In the past several months, divestment has become a conversation championed by unions in New York City and elsewhere. Rank-and-file members of the American Federation of Teachers, for example, announced on July 18 on X that they have successfully introduced a divestment resolution to their body. 

“If all locals and all unions committed to divestment, that would have a huge impact and really debilitate the apartheid regime,” Nanay said.