The Bhopal action for this year's Get on the Bus was a success beyond our expectations. As some of you may know, our original target was TIAA-CREF – an institutional investor in Dow Chemical that provides retirement funds for employees of academic institutions like Harvard University, as well as high school teachers' unions, both areas where AIUSA and Amnesty activists have presence and influence.  Just weeks before our planned demonstration, we learned that TIAA-CREF had expanded its Proxy Voting Guidelines to make an explicit commitment to demand disclosure about social and environmental risks associated with companies they are invested in.  We concluded that, based on their new policy, TIAA-CREF would clearly support the Bhopal resolution at Dow's shareholder meeting.

In light of the steps TIAA-CREF had taken, we decided to focus our efforts on another large institutional investor.  JP Morgan was selected as the new target of our Bhopal action because Amnesty activists and Bhopal supporters had sent over 2,000 emails and letters to JP Morgan representatives prior to GOTB expressing their concerns about JP Morgan's shares in Dow Chemical Company – with no response from the JP Morgan.  

A representative from JP Morgan finally contacted us on the morning of GOTB to arrange a meeting.  Your presence outside JP Morgan Chase's World Headquarters made the company take notice!  Imagine the impact of what we saw and heard from inside the building during our meeting on April 20th: 1,000 people spilling out of the police barricades, a sea of voices relentlessly demanding that JP Morgan stand up for justice in Bhopal, and employees, including top executives, creeping up to the windows to see what all the fuss was about. 

We learned that JP Morgan had not yet voted on the Bhopal resolution and were able to arrange a second meeting the following Friday, April 27th, with Amy Davidsen (Director, JP Morgan's Office of Environmental Affairs), Eileen Cohen (Chair, JP Morgan's North American Proxy Committee) and Theresa Schnepf (Managing Director, JP Morgan Global Risk Management) to further discuss the Bhopal resolution.  These are the people who deal with clients' investments and are directly responsible for determining how the company will vote on proxies, like the Bhopal resolution.
 

Updated on May 22, 2007

 

Unfortunately, the Bhopal resolution did not garner the 10% we needed to re-file it next year, but with 8.25% we did add nearly 2% to the vote from last year - a big part of this increase was the new support from TIAA-CREF and we will be doing some research to find out which other institutional investors voted yes - hopefully JP Morgan Chase and some of the universities that are part of AIUSA's SHARE POWER campaign! There's still plenty to celebrate -- more than 50 million shares voted in favor of the Bhopal resolution! And, as you may already know, AIUSA recently filed a letter of complaint and request for investigation of Dow with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). This will certainly keep the pressure on Dow.  For more details about the Dow Shareholder Meeting outcomes, please check out AIUSA's update:   http://www.amnestyusa.org/Dow_Chemical/Shareholder_Meeting_Update/ page.do?id=1011361&n1=3&n2=26&n3=1241