Find more information on the issues deeply affected by private equity investments:
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Labor and Employees
Private equity-owned companies directly employ more than 11.7 million of workers in the United States, plus millions more around the world, and the number continues to grow as private equity firms are acquiring additional companies at a record pace. Focused on growing cash flows at the companies they buy, private equity firms have often taken a low road approach and sought to reduce wages, benefits, and staffing at firms they acquire – with devastating consequences to workers, their families and entire communities.
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Housing
Post crisis, private equity firms aggressively invested in all parts of the US housing market (and increasingly globally as well), buying apartment buildings, single family homes, manufactured housing communities and mortgages. Aiming for double digit returns, private equity firms have at times led the market in rent increases and mortgage foreclosures.
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Healthcare
Private equity increasingly makes up a substantial portion of investment in U.S. healthcare companies, touching virtually every sector of the industry, and is expected to continue to grow. Asset managers have record levels of available capital earmarked for healthcare investment; as of 2019, private equity firms had $29.2 billion in capital waiting to be invested in healthcare.
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Climate and Energy
The private equity industry has pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into fossil fuels with no comprehensive disclosures of their holdings, let alone of their environmental and community impacts. Private equity firms are busy buying up offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, propping up fracking operations, prolonging dirty fuels usage by building infrastructure like pipelines and natural gas export terminals, polluting through gas and coal power plants.
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Detention and Surveillance
A handful of private equity firms, drawing on capital from pension funds, foundations, endowments, insurance companies, and other institutional investors have invested heavily in companies providing services to prisons, jails, and detention facilities around the United States and the more than two million people housed at those facilities.
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