Pensions, Organized Labor, and Financialization in Postwar US

While companies established the first retirement funds in the late nineteenth century, they proliferated after World War II and by the 1990s, owned close to one third of all domestic equities, according to historian Sanford Jacoby. Our proposed panel looks at pension funds and finance in the mid-twentieth century in the United States in three ways: the developing standards of pension investment, the regulatory apparatus imposed on pension fund managers, and the professionalization of this type of financial expertise. Organized labor’s pensions offer a particular case for understanding private pensions, because labor leaders often strategized alternative ways of managing its capital, hesitant to immediately embrace practices associated with businesses and private corporations. By looking at pension funds, particularly pension funds controlled by organized labor, we can better understand how worker’s capital fueled financialization.