Abstract

"Superannuation: Older Workers, Pensions, and Technological Change in the Early Twentieth Century"

Amanda Ciafone, University of Illinois Urbana, Champaign (AMANDA.CIAFONE@GMAIL.COM)

This paper will examine the origins of corporate pensions in the US as a form of welfare capitalism that provided the benefit of subsistence support at the end of one’s life but also coerced workers into loyalty to the employer. Workers, labor organizations, and social reformers were increasingly demanding pensions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The historical development of capitalism in the early twentieth century, the growth of monopoly capital, capital investment in technology and the mechanization of labor, labor speed up, and associated age discrimination against perceived inefficient older workers, led to both the possibility and the need to systematize old age income and socialize some of the costs of the social reproduction of the elderly.

This paper shows how discourses of technological change and the “superannuation” of older workers justified the emergence of corporate pensions. Older workers were deemed inefficient, physically limited, and mentally unable to adapt to the increased mechanization and accelerated speed of production, or “superannuated,” in the term of the day, to define a separation from work due to old age and implicitly, to be antiquated and “declared obsolete.” Superannuation in the early twentieth century was “old age as defined by industrial requirements.” Drawing on business perspectives from the Bulletin of Taylor Society and the Commercial and Financial Chronicle, the papers of workers’ and pension organizations, as well as a re-reading of the pension scholarship of the 1990s, this paper demonstrates that if it was in the public interest for workers to be supported in old age, companies and workers’ organizations contributed to the logic that it was mutually in their interest to move technologically inefficient workers onto the pension rolls.