Workers invested out of their jobs

[mahatmakanejeeves]

David H. Webber: Protecting public pension investments

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By David H. Webber November 20

David H. Webber is a professor at the Boston University School of Law.

Public pension funds should invest the retirement savings of government workers to secure their financial future, not undermine it. Yet across the country, these funds are financing companies that privatize their own workers’ jobs. And because many of these investments are funneled through ­private-equity companies, the problem is still largely hidden from public view. ... Pension trustees who are rightly concerned about these investments too often find themselves silenced by a subtle legalistic maneuver that took place six years ago last month and that could be stopped with the help of President Obama’s Labor Department.

Consider the public school system in Chelmsford, Mass. The schools employed custodians who were once paid $25 an hour and were promised a modest pension. For decades, the jobs had been reasonably stable. But as Bloomberg News reported, these custodians learned in 2012 that their jobs had been privatized and they were being fired. They were then offered the same job, at a 50 percent pay cut, by Aramark, a private firm that had been funded by their own pension funds. In other words, the pension plan was invested in a company that made money by slashing the future pensioners’ wages.

This pattern is surprisingly pervasive: The retirement funds of firefighters, teachers, prison guards and others are invested in private firefighting companies, private public-school-service companies and private prisons. These companies may offer the promise of high investment returns, but they may achieve those returns at the expense of the public employees themselves. The Florida Retirement System, with half its assets belonging to teachers and other school employees, bought Edison Schools, a company that ran public schools. Pension funds have financed the privatization of school bus companies, water utilities and libraries. Displaced workers not only stop contributing to the funds, losses that can harm other workers and retirees, but also often must turn to public assistance to survive, undermining the argument that taxpayers benefit from these transactions.
....

Pension trustees justify these investments by pointing to an “interpretive bulletin” issued by the Labor Department in the waning days of George W. Bush’s presidency, on Oct. 17, 2008. It does not technically apply to state and local pension funds, but it is widely relied upon to guide the interpretation of their trustees’ fiduciary duties.

[airplaneman]

1. four things are going to wipe the middle class out in this country

Privitization
Financialization
Globilization
Criminalization.

We need to start undoing these things or we are toast.
I see 2016 as pivotal if we have any real chance or not of changing these disastrous tends.
-Airplane