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Full-Text Articles in Law
Should Labor Abandon Its Capital? A Reply To Critics, David H. Webber
Should Labor Abandon Its Capital? A Reply To Critics, David H. Webber
Faculty Scholarship
Several recent works have sharply criticized public pension funds and labor union funds (“labor’s capital”). These critiques come from both the left and right. Leftists criticize labor’s capital for undermining worker interests by funding financialization and the growth of Wall Street. Laissez-faire conservatives argue that pension underfunding threatens taxpayers. The left calls for pensions to be replaced by a larger social security system. The libertarian right calls for them to be smashed and scattered into individually-managed 401(k)s. I review this recent work, some of which is aimed at my book, The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder: Labor’s Last Best Weapon, …
The Other Janus And The Future Of Labor’S Capital, David H. Webber
The Other Janus And The Future Of Labor’S Capital, David H. Webber
Faculty Scholarship
Two forms of labor’s capital—union funds and public pension funds—have profoundly reshaped the corporate world. They have successfully advocated for shareholder empowerment initiatives like proxy access, declassified boards, majority voting, say on pay, private fund registration, and the CEO-to-worker pay ratio. They have also served as lead plaintiffs in forty percent of federal securities fraud and Delaware deal class actions. Today, much-discussed reforms like revised shareholder proposal rules and mandatory arbitration threaten two of the main channels by which these shareholders have exercised power. But labor’s capital faces its greatest, even existential, threats from outside corporate law. This Essay addresses …
Reforming Pensions While Retaining Shareholder Voice, David H. Webber
Reforming Pensions While Retaining Shareholder Voice, David H. Webber
Faculty Scholarship
Public pension and labor union funds have been the driving force in diversified shareholder activism. They have also fended off attacks on jobs and proactively created jobs for fund contributors. These funds currently represent almost $4 trillion in assets over which workers have substantial control. That worker control - and the collective nature of defined benefit pension plans - is the necessary precondition for their shareholder activism. Both worker control and collective investment are directly threatened by the rise of defined contribution funds, particularly by well-funded efforts to promote the 401(k) in the public sector, the last bastion of the …
Can God Create A Rock So Heavy That He Cannot Lift It?: Outlawing Pensions Under State Constitutions, Chad J. Pomeroy
Can God Create A Rock So Heavy That He Cannot Lift It?: Outlawing Pensions Under State Constitutions, Chad J. Pomeroy
Faculty Articles
Public pensions are a problem. More than twenty-seven million people participate in state and local government pension plans. And those plans are in the hole trillions of dollars. This means that state and local governments are going to have to raise additional trillions in taxes (or shift those trillions away from schools, police, firemen, or other spending targets) to satisfy these obligations.
What can be done about such a large, seemingly intractable problem? A number of states have installed specific pension funding requirements within their constitutions. Most state constitutions contain some kind of balanced budget requirement, and a number of …
The Impact Of Law On The State Pension Crisis, Elizabeth S. Goldman, Stewart E. Sterk
The Impact Of Law On The State Pension Crisis, Elizabeth S. Goldman, Stewart E. Sterk
Faculty Articles
While some state and municipal pension plans have funds sufficient to meet obligations to retirees without imposing onerous obligations on current and future taxpayers, underfunding of plans in other states has reached disastrous proportions, raising the possibility of default on pension obligations, cuts in public services, steep tax increases, or some combination of the three. The substantial differential in pension funding might be attributed to divergent political pressures, different responses to uncertainty about investment returns, or other factors. Our examination of pension funding law in ten states-five with the best-funded plans and five with the worst-funded plans-highlights the role of …
Op-Ed: California’S Most Powerful Voice On Wall Street? Its Pensions, David H. Webber
Op-Ed: California’S Most Powerful Voice On Wall Street? Its Pensions, David H. Webber
Shorter Faculty Works
The fight over public pensions in California is almost exclusively described as a dispute between people worried about tax hikes and public servants wanting to get paid what they were promised. But this is only part of the pension story — one focused on the “liability” side of the balance sheet.
Promises To Keep: Ensuring The Payment Of Americans' Pension Benefits In The Wake Of The Great Recession, Kenneth G. Dau-Schmidt
Promises To Keep: Ensuring The Payment Of Americans' Pension Benefits In The Wake Of The Great Recession, Kenneth G. Dau-Schmidt
Articles by Maurer Faculty
In this essay, I examine the problem of designing a pension plan within the context of our larger public policy of encouraging workers to save for retirement. I discuss the various problems and risks inherent in encouraging workers to adequately save for retirement, invest those assets efficiently, and ensure the planned level of retirement consumption for the remainder of their lives. I also discuss the three major types of pension plans in the American retirement system, defined benefit, defined contribution, and hybrid, and assess how well each of these types of plans deals with the problems encountered in designing a …
The Temporally-Flawed Concept Of Binding Promises In American Collective Bargaining And Employee Benefits Law: A Source Of The Concurrent Crises In The U.S. Industrial Relations, Retirement, And Health Care Systems, Marley S. Weiss
Faculty Scholarship
The American collective bargaining system is in serious trouble, as is the employee benefits system providing pensions and health care benefits for millions of non-union as well as unionized workers and retirees. The portion of the labor force covered by collective bargaining has dropped so low that one can barely refer to it as a system. Simultaneously, the American private employer-based pension system is moving towards a crisis. Large employers with the finest pension plans, covering thousands of workers and retirees, in industry after industry, are terminating their pension plans, or replacing them with cheaper, weaker retirement programs, often while …