Labor Union Pension Muscle's Double Edged Sword w/ Sandy Jacoby | MR LIVE 4/25/22

It's Sam's triumphant return to the show! He and Emma host Sandy Jacoby, Research Professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, to discuss his book Labor in the Age of Finance: Pensions, Politics, and Corporations from Deindustrialization to Dodd-Frank. #politics #unions

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Professor Jacoby begins by situating the first era of union financialization at the end of the 19th Century with the birth of labor banks as a way to bolster worker funds, until the Great Depression flipped nearly every single one belly up, burning the relationship between the two sectors for much of the next fifty years over the New Deal era. The start of the neoliberal era in the 70s forced unions to look for ways to boost their power once again, turning to union pension funds, which offered both direct and indirect control over money for their workers, with a particular focus on the public State and Local funds such as CalPERS, which used their billions to bolster myriad labor fights in their state. After briefly touching on the different structures of the public pension funds, Professor Jacoby, Emma, and Sam dive into how this led to these funds putting in place shareholder policies, trading financial support for policies that favor shareholders’ profits over workers, particularly pushing stock options and stock-based pay for executives, seeing a complete shift to marketization, including swapping pensions for 401ks, and commitments to labor squeezes to bolster share prices. Next, Professor Jacoby dives into how this financialization tied the roles of these pensions, shareholders, and CEOs together, fighting for the same short term returns despite their inverse relationship with the health of corporations, labor, and community, and how this structure forced union objections to be made in alignment with shareholder profits. They wrap up the interview by exploring what separating unions’ organizing interests from their pension interests could look like, the role that de-financializing corporations plays, and where the world of labor is at in this conversation.

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