How Can Workers Control Their Pensions? A Union Strategy Emerges – Non Profit News

The following is a transcript of the video above, from our webinar “Remaking the Economy: Escaping Corporate Capture.” View the full webinar here.

Sara Myklebust: There’s about $6 trillion for just municipal and state public workers in the US in their pensions—in deferred compensation, right? And if you can believe it, that’s actually underfunded from what about 15 million workers need and have been promised for their retirement.

What does that mean? It puts the pension boards in a position where they feel like, “We’ve got to make more money.” And it’s estimated that 65 percent of the money in pension funds needs to be made off of the investments because they just didn’t put enough in to begin with. And a big reason for that is because wealthy folks and corporations are not paying enough taxes for us to have the revenue to do it, among many, many other things that we all are fighting for.

And what happens then is the pension boards say, “What do we do?” And of course, those same wealthy corporations and individuals say, “We have the solution. We’re asset managers, we’re investment managers, and we can help you get really high returns, and get as much money as possible through your investments.”

Three huge problems with that. One, they charge really high fees that they get no matter what. So, they’re going to make—in addition to all the billions they’ve already made—much more money. Two, we don’t know—and there’s really no accountability—whether or not they’re actually going to deliver on those returns that they’re promising. And there’s a lot of evidence that they can’t, actually.

And three, and probably most importantly, they’re investing in really, really terrible things that are bad for union members, for workers, for our communities, for our families. That includes landlords that are rent gouging, evicting, that don’t maintain their properties. It’s weapons manufacturers. It’s folks that are polluting, fossil fuels. It’s—on the healthcare side—companies that are cutting jobs, that are not providing basic services, that are closing hospitals around the country. All this terrible, terrible stuff.

So, what are we doing about that as a movement? Over the last several decades, it’s not a new thing, people have known about this—or a lot of folks have, and probably many of you on this call—that this is happening for a long time. And where most of the effort has been focused is in national unions, federations, and national organizations. Particularly in the climate justice side, they’re engaging with those pension boards and trustees to try to get them to change through enacting policies or principles or divesting from particular companies. And the huge change that we need in how our pension system operates to be able to get money to invest in things that we actually need, instead of undermining workers as well as our communities, just isn’t happening from that approach.

And what we talk about in the article [for the Nonprofit Quarterly Magazine] is how to change that, how to go in deep with union members—which is what Common Good work does, in general—but, in particular, with pensions. Talk to them about how their money is being invested and what change could look like. Not just pulling it out of one company, putting it in another bad one. But putting it into things that can benefit them, their families, and their communities. And that they have the right—it’s their money—to demand that that happens.