Local 1113 passes resolution calling for Israeli divestment

Members of Local 1113 are the latest public-sector workers in New York City to vote to pass a resolution calling for their pensions to be divested from Israeli stocks and bonds. The small union of around 725 investigators and finance employees in more than a dozen city agencies is the second local within District Council 37 to do pass a divestment resolution and fourth union representing the city's public-sector workers to do so.

“Local 1113 refuses to allow its members’ dues to financially support apartheid, persecution and genocide and calls for an immediate divestment of all New York City pension funds from Israeli companies and the state of Israel in line with Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS), a Palestinian-led movement for freedom, justice and equality,” the resolution reads.  

It passed with 33 members voting in support, none voting against it and five abstentions in a union general membership meeting on April 8, said Rob Bryan, the union’s sergeant-at-arms.  

"We were outraged by the genocide in Gaza and the fact that our money was being used in that genocide through our pensions, so it seemed like a clear-cut way to support the boycott and to follow in the footsteps of these others locals that are doing the same thing,” Bryan said. "We're literally helping buy weapons that kill people." 

The resolution also calls for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Local 1113’s parent union, to create an investigative body that creates a report on “ways in which the international union is complicit in the genocide of Palestinians.” 

A spokesperson for DC 37 did not respond to a request for comment.  

Local 1113’s top officers and executives, which was swept into power as a unified slate in two union elections last summer, supported the divestment measure, Bryan said. The union leader said that the new officers, most of whom work in the Civilian Complaint Review Board, were determined to get the union’s finances under control, support members by filing grievances and boost member engagement.  

'Our pensions have tremendous leverage'

The Association of Legislative Employees, a union of workers at the City Council, in June 2024 became the first union representing public-sector workers to pass a resolution calling for pension divestment from Israel. Local 3005, a union of around 1,000 Office of Chief Medical Examiner and Department of Health and Mental Hygiene workers, passed a resolution in September of that year after the union’s former president resigned amid conflict with members pushing for the resolution. 

Meghan Peterson, the president of Local 3005, said in a texted statement that divesting from “genocidal violence” is more important than ever.  

“We are encouraged by Local 1113’s participation in the democratic process and hope others will follow suit,” she said. “Our pensions have tremendous leverage to fund a more just future that benefits all of us. We hope that the new administration takes these demands seriously.” 

In early 2025, the delegate assembly of the Professional Staff Congress of CUNY passed a divestment resolution in a close vote, but the resolution was later revoked. Members of Local 375, a powerful DC 37 local of 5,000 engineers, architects, planners and scientists had their attempts at advancing a similar resolution stifled in 2024. 

City Comptroller Mark Levine has signaled he’d like to invest more of the city’s five pension funds in Israeli bonds and in the stocks of Israeli companies, despite the resolutions that have passed, pleas from city workers and Jewish Voice for Peace, a Jewish group that advocates on behalf of Palestinians. 

Former Comptroller Brad Lander quietly allowed nearly $40 million of the pension system's holdings in Israel to expire as part of a larger project to divest from all countries' sovereign bonds, leaving just over $1 million invested in Israeli bonds across the city’s five pension systems, the lowest amount since the funds first invested in the 1970’s.  

Workers and advocates protested outside of Levine’s office late last year to push him to follow Lander’s lead and, on the same day that Local 1113 passed their resolution, advocates once again protested outside Levine’s office to call for divestment.  

A spokesperson for Levine did not respond to a request for comment.  

"It does illustrate the two-prong nature of this movement," Bryan said of the protest outside Levine's office. "It's a sign of the times, of how things have shifted."