Open letter to UniSaver Board members 2025 from University Workers for Palestine, dated Thursday, October 2, 2025, 10am.
Tēnā koutou katoa,
University Workers for Palestine has been trying for over a year to get UniSaver, the preferred superannuation provider for most universities, to divest from Israel and companies complicit in occupation and genocide, and develop a BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) policy. We’ve had no response from them. So we’re drawing a line in the sand. This open letter makes clear that if they don’t respond in an ethical, meaningful way, university communities will support a campaign to sever ties with them and take our, and our employers’, contributions elsewhere.
If you work at a New Zealand university, please sign on, and share with other university workers (and we also invite others, including our students, alumni and former colleagues, to sign in solidarity). We will be sending this letter to UniSaver at the start of November.
In solidarity, University Workers for Palestine (Uni4pal)
*******
To the UniSaver Board,
We are writing to you to demand that you divest immediately from all holdings that are complicit in the genocide of Palestinians. In August of last year, you received an open letter with 400 signatures pointing out some of the worst investments (like Elbit Systems and Palantir Technologies) and asking you to develop a divestment policy. You never bothered to contact letter signatories and you have apparently done nothing to change UniSaver investments.
A year has passed, a year in which genocide has accelerated; many thousands of Palestinians, including our university colleagues, have been killed during this time, in what has been described as a scholasticide.
We are writing to you now to reiterate our call for you to divest and develop a divestment policy to prevent future investments in companies that are complicit in genocide and apartheid. To repeat from our letter a year ago (with the addition of point 4), we demand that UniSaver Limited:
- Take immediate steps to review its portfolios and to terminate its holdings in entities which make it, and us as members of UniSaver, complicit in the crimes of the Israeli state,
- Outline a clear plan for divestment where immediate termination is not possible, and
- Develop policy measures to ensure its financial and investment strategies are in keeping with the internationally recognised BDS framework.
- Update the Responsible Investment Policy to require the investment manager to divest from companies found to be complicit in the genocide of Palestinians.
If you don’t withdraw our funds from genocide, we, the undersigned, will support a campaign to get universities in Aotearoa New Zealand to sever ties with you. We will not accept our retirement funds fuelling the genocide of Palestinians.We expect to hear a response from the Unisaver board by the end of November.
About University Workers for Palestine
We are a collective of university workers from institutions across Aotearoa in active support of a Free Palestine. We are organising to oppose the occupation, apartheid, scholasticide, and genocide in Gaza, and to act in solidarity with Palestine. This has included a call for Unisaver, the university supported superannuation scheme, to divest from entities that are invested in and benefit from the illegal military occupation of Palestinian territories, as well as the genocidal war on Gaza. In July 2024 an open letter written by UW4P collected over 400 signatures.
