Date: Sun, 23 Nov 1997 14:04:34 -0500
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: M-G: Re: MIM sweeps away assorted rubbish


Mark Jones wrote:

>And I guess you would have to apply to Doug Henwood to
>know how much workers with pensions or stocks and bonds actually benefit, but
>the amounts are puny.

Yeah, they are. I almost commented on the original MIM post, but I've
gotten tired of squabbling with them over the years. I laughed when I saw
their stuff on "employee ownership" - the sort of employee stock ownership
plans (ESOPs) they're talking about are a joke. They offer employees
virtually none of the legal rights of ownership - no influence over
corporate policy, no right to see the books, etc. ESOPs are basically a tax
dodge and a retirement plan, not a form of worker ownership/control. (See
the article in the forthcoming LBO by Adria Scharf and Richard Marens for
more.) The stuff about pensions was only a bit less of a joke. A minority
of the U.S. workforce is covered by pension plans, and most have little
control over the shares they own - the voting rights are in the hands of
portfolio managers. (And those shares are often voted in a very anti-worker
manner: the California Public Employee Retirement System, Calpers, has been
at the forefront of the lean & mean, downsizing mania in the U.S. for the
last 5-10 years.) And, conceptually, worker pensions are deferred wages,
not real accumulations of capital. Ideologically, ownership of stocks and
bonds in pension/retirement plans may cause workers to identify with the
interests of capital, but this is about as pure an example of false
consciousness as you could find. How typical of MIM to take a 5-year-old
piece of bourgeois propaganda and fall for it entirely.

Doug




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