We are entrusted with the pensions of 4.7 million American workers. We must ask private equity firms the hard questions—even if they don’t like it

(Credit: Barry Chin - The Boston Globe - Getty Images)

Randi Weingarten is the president of AFT. Sean McGarvey is the president of North America's Building Trades Unions.

Earlier this month, Steward Health Care, a major hospital chain, filed for bankruptcy. Like so many other bankruptcies in recent decades, it followed the purchase of the chain in a leveraged buyout by a private equity fund that controlled a large stake in the chain between 2010 and 2020. Meanwhile, the Biden administration, drawing on a trove of new data, is concerned that too many private equity funds exploit investors and treat employees as expendable, hurting them and the economy as a whole.