< The 2014 Pension 40: The Battle Is On
7
Damon Silvers
Director of Policy
and Special Counsel
AFL-CIO
Last year: 6
As director of policy and special counsel for the AFL-CIO, the U.S.’s largest federation of unions, with 12.6 million members, Damon Silvers is a powerful voice defending defined benefit pensions. “Real pensions provide real retirement security because they have real funding structures, because they pool risks that individuals cannot manage on their own and because they give ordinary people access to professional money management at very low cost,” says Silvers, 50, who joined the AFL-CIO as associate general counsel in 1997. “Replacing real pensions with savings accounts leaves workers with pitiful account balances, prey to high fees and facing longevity and capital market risk that they have no way of managing.” Silvers graduated from Harvard College and received a JD from Harvard Law School and an MBA from Harvard Business School. His labor activities began when he was one of two undergraduates invited to join the negotiating team of the union representing Harvard’s dining hall staff. He was also a student leader in efforts to get institutions to divest from corporations doing business with apartheid South Africa. One of his early AFL-CIO assignments was negotiating severance and pension packages for laid-off WorldCom and Enron Corp. workers. These days pensions are not the only issue in Silvers’ portfolio, but he remains passionate about them. “When an employer commits to a pension, that is a contractual obligation,” he says. “We hear in this country that contractual obligations are sacred. It would be nice if that applied to ordinary people as well as banks.”
The 2014 Pension 40
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| Bruce Rauner Illinois | John and Laura Arnold Laura and John Arnold Foundation | Randi Weingarten American Federation of Teachers | Rahm Emanuel Chicago | David Boies Boies, Schiller & Flexner |
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| Randy DeFrehn National Coordinating Committee for Multiemployer Plans | Damon Silvers AFL-CIO | Laurence Fink BlackRock | Chris Christie New Jersey | Robin Diamonte United Technologies Corp. |
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
| Ted Eliopoulos California Public Employees’ Retirement System | John Kline Minnesota | J. Mark Iwry U.S. Treasury Department | Gina Raimondo Rhode Island | Phyllis Borzi U.S. Labor Department |
| 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 |
| Orrin Hatch Utah | Abigail Johnson Fidelity Investments | Ted Wheeler Oregon | Caitlin Long Morgan Stanley | James Hoffa International Brotherhood of Teamsters |
| 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| Amy Kessler Prudential Financial | Alejandro García Padilla Puerto Rico | Christopher Klein U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Caifornia | Steven Rhodes Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Michigan | Kevin de León California |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
| David Draine Pew Charitable Trusts | Jordan Marks National Public Pension Coalition | Sam Liccardo California | Joshua Rauh Stanford Graduate School of Business | Karen Ferguson and Karen Friedman Pension Rights Center |
| 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 |
| Timothy Blake Moody’s Investors Service | Kathleen Kennedy Townsend Center for Retirement Initiatives, Georgetown University | Edward (Ted) Siedle Benchmark Financial Services | Daniel Loeb Third Point | Judy Mares Employee Benefits Security Administration, U.S. Labor Department |
| 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 |
| Andrew Biggs American Enterprise Institute | Andy Stern Columbia University | Kenneth Mehlman KKR & Co. | Teresa Ghilarducci New School for Social Research | A. Melissa Moye U.S. Treasury Department |
