I’ve reached my max on the convention grind. What happens at conventions really is about relationship building, along with the content. But, hey, there is some SEIU-related stuff out there today that’s worth mentioning.

    Quick. Snap question: after Wal-Mart, who is the second-largest employer in the country? Dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah (this would be sung to the Jeopardy final question tune….).

    Answer: KKR. That would be Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., the private equity buy-out firm. Of the top ten employers in the country, four are private equity firms, owning everything from donuts to movie theaters to huge cleaning companies. And, yet, they operate very much in secret, far from any scrutiny, even though what they do effects millions of workers’ lives directly and, certainly, indirectly in terms of how they influence the economy.

    Which brings me to today’s The New York Times story:

It started with faux billionaires in the Hamptons and a fat-cat tycoon (or at least an actor wearing a cat mask) in Washington. Now, a union-led campaign against wealthy private equity firms is going global.

Beginning Wednesday, the Service Employees International Union, one of the country’s biggest unions, will call upon people to attend protests on July 17 in 100 cities in 25 countries. The rallying cry will be: Take back the economy from buyout firms that the union says have exploited tax loopholes to amass great wealth at others’ expense.

“We think the buyout industry and the way it operates are systematic of what’s wrong in this economy,” said Stephen Lerner, director of the union’s private equity project. “We want to make them responsible corporate citizens.”

     And…

The union argues that buyout executives like David M. Rubenstein of Carlyle and Henry R. Kravis of Kohlberg Kravis have gamed the tax code, reaping huge gains by piling debt on companies their firms have acquired, only to deduct the interest from their corporate taxes.

S.E.I.U. officials acknowledge, however, that changing the tax code could upend the modern corporate regime and say they have not endorsed any specific proposals.

The union also argues that the attention on private equity firms has been justified by the huge role they now play in the economy. Companies owned at least in part by Kohlberg Kravis employ more than 816,000 people, according to the firm’s Web site — more than the population of San Francisco.

    Some other specifics on what these buy-out firms are up to from SEIU’s website:

• The biggest five private equity deals together are larger than the annual budgets of all but 16 of the world’s largest nations. The five biggest deals involved more money than the annual budgets of Russia and India.

• The annual revenue of the largest private equity firms and their portfolio companies would give private equity four of the top 25 spots in the Fortune 500. One firm, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. would crack the top 10. These private equity firms have more annual revenue than companies such as Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Berkshire Hathaway.

• The top 20 private equity firms alone control companies that employ nearly 4 million workers.

• There were a record $197 billion worth of private equity mergers in first quarter of 2007 alone.

• Industry analysts say a $100 billion private equity buyout deal is not out of the question—putting huge companies such as Dell, Boeing, and Apple Computer within range of the buyout industry.

    These are good targets.