In addition to the large public pensions, many of the key players in this space are the capital strategies departments of key unions, such as the AFL-CIO Office of Investment and the capital strategies divisions of the North America’s Building Trades Union, the American Federation of Teachers, the Service Employees’ International Union, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, the United Food and Commercial Workers union, and others. Sometimes workers outright control the board more often they constitute a minority of trustees. Sometimes those worker slots are controlled or heavily influenced by unions. These workers are elected by other workers (or retirees) who participate in the funds. Almost all public pension plans have worker representatives on the boards of trustees, the equivalent of worker representation on corporate boards. The most famous examples are the California Public Employees’ Retirement System ( $350 billion in assets), the California State Teachers Retirement System ($223.8 billion), the New York City Pension Funds ( $195 billion), and the New York Common Retirement Funds ( $207.4. stock market, and at least a third of “alternative investment vehicles” like private equity. These large state, city, and county employee retirement plans hold at least $4 trillion in assets, roughly 10% of the U.S. How did we get to a place where some workers get to decide how their retirement assets should be invested, while others don’t? What were the key fights between labor groups, employers, and financial industry players on this question, and what were the outcomes?ĭavid Webber: Worker shareholder power can be found mostly in public sector pension plans, which are publicly-created retirement plans that invest the retirement savings of public-sector workers. LPE: Let’s start with where we are now and how we got here. Make sure to check out Part II and Part III. If shareholder primacy is the dominant paradigm of our financialized economy – usually a problematic proposition in these pages – then shouldn’t workers have a say in how these companies are run? Webber and McCarthy are both sympathetic to this idea, but disagree about how well such efforts have worked in the past and how likely they are to work in the future. Workers’ retirement savings make up a substantial share of the capital invested in the public stock market and the private equity market. Webber and Michael McCarthy on the prospect of combating neoliberal corporate governance through the shareholder activities of workers’ pension funds. This is Part I of a conversation between David H.
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