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Bloomberg
Amazon.com, landlords who charge sky-high rents, brands that fail to adapt. The carnage in the retail industry has been blamed on all of them. Now Wall Street is being blamed too.
Over the past decade, 597,000 US employees working for retailers owned by private equity (PE) firms and hedge funds have lost their jobs, while the sector as a whole added more than a million positions, according to a report by the Center for Popular Democracy and the Private Equity Stakeholder Project.
The workers advocacy groups estimate that another 728,000 “indirect jobs†have disappeared at suppliers and local businesses, bringing the total casualties to about 1.3 million.
“It is unsurprising that 10 out of the 14 largest retail chain bankruptcies since 2012 were at private equity-acquired chains,†the study, titled
“Pirate Equity,†said.