1199 SEIU must do better investing in minority biz

Harlem civil rights leader Al Sharpton on Saturday slammed one of the most powerful unions in New York for its failure to direct its assets into minority-run investment funds.

During his weekly broadcast from his National Action Network headquarters in Harlem, Sharpton said he’s concerned that the influential 1199 Service Employees International Union Local is not investing in a way that reflects the diversity of its members, following an exclusive report by The Post about the union’s hypocritical investment strategy.

“Across the board, unions and labor must do business in a way that reflects their politics, and I believe they will,” Sharpton said.

“But I am going to make sure; we are going to sit down with them. I think it’s important. I want the members of [NAN] and the members of unions to be assured that we are going to meet with [union presidents] in the next week or so. That’s important.”

Sharpton said he already met with George Gresham, the president of 1199 SEIU, and would continue talks with the powerful union, which operates in New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, Washington, DC, and Florida.

His pointed comments come less than two days after The Post revealed that the union is falling flat in investing its funds with minority investment funds.

The union SEIU, which helped propel Bill de Blasio into two terms as the city’s mayor, has ignored lobbying pushes to invest some of its fortune into women-owned and minority-run funds. 

The union, led since 2007 by Gresham, boasts that a majority of its 304,982 members are women, while it has focused efforts on recruiting among minority communities.

But records inspected by The Post show that one of those eight funds alone, the National Benefit Fund, has more than $17 billion invested with major Wall Street firms including Blackstone and Apollo Global Management, Beverly Hills-based Platinum Equity, and a series of other hedge funds and private equity funds.

“They are really not supporting their diverse base in terms of their investment strategy,” said Robert Greene, CEO of the National Association of Investment Companies, the industry association for diverse-owned private equity firms and hedge funds. “They have very little invested with minority-run investment funds.”