Re: [Pen-l] CounterPunch, the most widely read radical website in the English...

["Jim Devine" <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx>]

Patrick Bond wrote:
> Actually, the 'bad luck' was part of a top-down business-government
> class-war strategy, was it not, to avoid a social welfare state and increase
> the bargaining power of capital versus labor in the 1940s? ...

Corporate pensions were "deferred compensation." Instead of paying
workers more now, they'd be paid later (if they were lucky). The
corporations hoped that it would promote worker loyalty.  The UAW was
willing to go along. In this case, it was more of a compromise in the
class war than a corporate class-war strategy. (In other cases, it was
part of "welfare capitalism," which was simply a top-down plan to
avoid unions, etc. That fits your description.)

Of course, when the US economy went kerplooey in the 1970s and after,
these "defined-benefit" pension plans mostly became untenable and the
corporations weaseled out of them. Some tapped the pension funds for
cash when the stock in the trust fund was up and then claimed poverty
when it was down. Most defined-benefit plans in the private sector
have been replaced by defined-contribution IRAs, shifting the risk to
the workers.

In retrospect, it looks like corporate defined-benefit pension plans
could only have lasted as long as the stable oligopolies of the 1950s
and 1960s persisted in the US. They fit the political economy of the
day, but not the one of our day. If you want defined-benefit plans,
it's got to be government-sponsored (in a rich country) like the US
OASI (social security).
-- 
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own
way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
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