The employees of North Portland mattress factory Sealy (in which KKR is the largest shareholder) are working with The Oregon Working Family Party in an attempt to save their jobs.

After a year-long search, Oregon’s Treasury named John Skjervem as the chief investment officer for the state’s main pension funds, which collectively manage $74 billion in assets. Skjervem replaces Ronald Schmitz, who announced last September that he was leaving…

As one of the first public pension funds to commit to private equity, Oregon continues singing the praises of the asset class.

When a large public pension fund dangles $900,000 in potential compensation in front of applicants, it gets a lot easier to lure top talent.

That is exactly what the $51 billion Virginia Retirement System did when it announced it hired Ronald Schmitz (pictured) as its chief investment officer, replacing Charles Grant, whose contract expired in August. Schmitz is scheduled to start at the end of October.

Schmitz was hired away from the $60 billion Oregon Public Employees Retirement System, where he has been chief investment officer since 2003. Prior to Oregon, Schmitz had a similar role at the Illinois State Board of Investment.

Looking for return data? We have return data. Or rather, we have links to return data.

Click “read more” below to get links to return data from nine pensions. The editorial team of sister publication Buyouts Magazine has been hard at work compiling all these numbers into a spreadsheet for our annual look at industry returns. Altogether our database has 443 U.S. and international buyout funds and turnaround/distressed funds spanning vintage years 1981 to 2005. Of those, we have investment multiples for 366 of them. And the quartile dividing lines? These probably won’t come as a big surprise for dedicated students of industry performance. It takes an investment multiple of 2 to crach the top quartile, 1.5 is median and 1.2 marks the bottom quartile.