You know if you don’t like the way things are going, you can vote for/against trustees. We are all investors through the 401k and the proxy stuff just was emailed out.
2 replies (most recent on top)
@a8 employees know and most of us are participants. How many people do you think actually vote anyway?
Unfortunately, this would require the participants to be fully aware of how the company is run and how the employees are managed. If they ask the company, everything is fine, great. TIAA is striving to deliver unrivalled service and value to "those who serve the greater good".....blah blah blah. The only way enough participants would get motivated to change trustees is if someone else told them about reality at TIAA instead of the fairy tale virtue vi-----r they get from marketing and the company line. Anyone who really knew the reality and was willing to spell it out for participants would be in violation of any NDA or non-disparagement form they had to sign while onboarding. As a result, The CEO and current Board Members choose their friends and allies to serve on the board and all those people have the kind of academic and social justice credentials that keep that "virtue vi-----r" buzzing inside the minds of academics that make up TIAA participants. They get all aro--ed by a board member bio who A) teaches about running companies or B) wrote a book about running great companies or C) someone who checks the right social justice boxes with an advanced degree from some school they could never get into as a student or teacher. What they need is someone who can actually LEAD a company out of trouble. The closest they ever came to that was Herb Allison, who was just another "Tough Love", "Rank 'em and Yank 'em" Jack Welch wannabe.
Our board is a bunch of academics and corporate DEI surfers who've never successfully run anything as big as TIAA. Heck, the current guy in charge of the board ran his company, Weight Watchers, into bankruptcy....and that's apparently our big g-n with the "real world" business chops. The rest are all tweedy, Ivy Tower types with massive academic egos and zero experience with the accountability of a real business. They just keep those virtue vibrators buzzing and collect their massive board fee.