Word: pension
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...entirely. This is the revelation dawning on the anemic Goliath Big Labor as it squares off against Goliath Business in a drawn-out tussle over turf. While corporations move their facilities into Sunbelt territories where unions do not flourish, labor is making tentative approaches toward asserting its authority over pension investments, once the exclusive domain of management. Pension funds may turn out to be just the resource labor needs in its declining years...
...this atmosphere of tension unionists are becoming sensitive to the ways corporations are using the deferred savings of their employees. Shortly before he assumed the AFL-CIO helm, Lane Kirkland told his colleagues that "pension funds have been used by some banks and investment counselors to finance runaway employers to the injury of the very unions and workers who negotiated and created those funds. That has to stop." The question of who has the right to control pension-fund investment is a controversial one with far-reaching implications for the structure of the economy...
...their 1978 manifesto The North Will Rise Again, Jeremy Rifkin and Randy Barber estimated that "over $200 billion in pension-fund capital comes from the combined deferred savings of 19 million union members and the public employee funds of the 16 states that make up the northeast/midwest corridor." All pension-fund portfolios could total $1.3 trillion by the late 1980s, controlling half the securities of U.S. industry, according to recent calculations in Fortune magazine...
...staggering figures will probably prompt Kirkland and his cohorts to challenge management authority over pension money very cautiously, out of fear of a backlash. But Barber, co-director of the People's Business Commission, points out that if union efforts were to provoke new legal restrictions on pension investment, "you haven't lost anything." However, he believes such business attempts would fail, in part because state and local governments would regard legal thwarting of union control as raising the threat of eventual federal encroachment onto their own sovereignty...
...OTHER HAND, Barber acknowledges that union leaders must go a long way in educating the rank and file before they can be sure the members will fight for pension control demands presented on the bargaining table. Increased educational programs may be one of the recommendations in a forthcoming study of the pension issue commissioned by the AFL-CIO Executive Council. The AFL-CIO's Industrial Union Department is also expected to release its own study of the matter in the next few months...