Making sure your pension money won't buy pink slips for other workers

What can individuals do?
  Individuals can work against corporate downsizing as individual investors, union members and citizens. The easiest, but most limited, approach for individuals is to support the so-called 'ethical' mutual funds. Ethical funds do their best to avoid companies with poor labour relations and practices but carry the disadvantage of having little real impact on corporate operations. The amount of capital they actually control is a drop in the mutual and pension fund bucket and they tend to employ investment criteria based on a relatively limited definition of what constitutes 'ethical' behaviour. More useful is for individuals as union members to pressure for greater activism on the part of their pension funds. In the United States, employee pension funds have been used to some limited effect in putting pressure on corporate managers, particularly during contract negotiations. The most useful course of action for individuals concerned about corporate downsizing - and problems of the free market more generally - is to become active as a citizen. Real change will only occur if governments take regulatory action. In the specific case of corporate downsizing, one mechanism for limiting the influence of investment funds over companies is for the government to place restrictions on the use of stock options. For example, before it was abandoned a few years ago, the Toronto Stock Exchange had a rule that limited a company's issuing of stock options to 10 percent of its outstanding common shares.