The Minnesota state agency that oversees public employee retirement funds is a multi-billion-dollar investor in a private equity firm that owns a company accused of employing children to clean slaughterhouses, including two plants in Minnesota.
The State Board of Investment has pension money in more than two dozen funds that the Blackstone Group manages. While the fund that controls the company accused of child labor violations is not on the state’s list of investments, Minnesota officials say they are reviewing their positions in Blackstone amid those ethical concerns.
After MPR News asked the board to comment on the state’s investments, the board sent a statement saying in part: “[W]e immediately reached out to Blackstone. In our discussions, we conveyed how seriously we take our role as stewards of capital and reiterated our expectations regarding business and ethical standards. Blackstone conveyed to us that they are aggressively investigating these allegations and take this matter very seriously, on both a legal and human level.”
The child labor accusations surfaced earlier this month when the U.S. Labor Department alleged in a civil suit that Packers Sanitation Services Inc. of Wisconsin, known as PSSI, hired at least 31 minors for overnight cleaning shifts at three meat processing plants, including one in Worthington and another in Marshall in southwestern Minnesota.
A limited partnership formed by the Blackstone Group purchased PSSI for an...
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