The outrageous gutting of the Eugene Register-Guard as reported in Sunday’s Oregonian/OregonLive is yet another example in a long line of abuses by private equity companies that have received investments from the Oregon Public Employees Retirement Fund, (“Eugene Register-Guard languishes under Gannett, nation’s largest newspaper chain,” May 21).
Besides running companies like the Register Guard into the ground, private equity companies that have received these Oregon PERF investments have enabled the murder of a journalist, funded private prisons used to detain migrants during the Trump administration, and fired 30,000 Toys R US workers without severance pay.
At a 2018 Oregon Investment Council meeting, I witnessed a group of desperate ex-Toys R Us employees come forward and poignantly plead that OIC use its influence to help them get severance pay.
Whenever calls are made to OIC or Treasurer Tobias Read to help mitigate bad behavior enabled by OIC investments, the reaction is the same: it would violate the “paramount objective” of maximizing investment returns. Apparently even when companies do evil things.
But when lives are lost, thousands of employees are fired without severance, or a storied local newspaper with almost 100 years of history is destroyed practically overnight, ignoring the human costs amounts to nothing less than depraved indifference.
And what was OIC’s reaction when the fired workers finished their plea?
The treasurer and council members just stared back, silent and impassive. And there is no record that anyone at OIC ever made an effort to advocate for severance pay.
Douglas Berg, Eugene
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