This workshop proposes to explore four related themes involving pension funds, workers capital agendas and financialization. A program is provided in the link below.

1. Financialization of Capitalism and the Constraints on Pension Funds

What is 'financialization', and how has it has transformed pensions and the provision of retirement income?  How are the design and management of public and private pensions today shaped and constrained by financial capital and its role in the global economic order?

2. Pension Fund Activism

How does thinking about financialization help us understand the possibilities, limits and contradictions of socially-responsible investment, divestment campaigns, and capital stewardship strategies broadly?

3. Labour's Capital

What are the dynamics and contradictions behind the growing pension fund involvement in the privatization of public services and assets? In what ways do the realities of pension board decision-making distort labour's voice and limit the opportunity for greater control over workers' deferred wages?

4. Rethinking Retirement Provision and Pension Fund Activism

Is there an alternative way of saving, investing and delivering secure, adequate retirement incomes that might transcend actually-existing pension fund management, tempered by responsible investment?  What sorts of institutions, ideas and politics would be needed to achieve that alternative approach?

Date: Friday, January 15, 2016 - 08:00 to 15:00