The primary issue is retirement security. In 2019, Valley Ford Truck demanded and won the elimination of the traditional pension plan in favor of a 401(k) retirement savings plan. Retirement income is more secure with a pension benefit defined in the contract. With a savings account that goes up and down with Wall Street booms and crashes, there’s no way to predict how much money will be in it when a worker decides to retire.
Now, however, the company wants to terminate the 401(k) and use the money it saves to cover demands for wage increases — leaving workers with neither a pension nor savings when they retire. Cleveland area unions have made it clear that attacks on pensions are unacceptable.
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Good: The 401(k) is one of neoliberalism’s crowning achievements. Its effects are breathtaking in scope.
- It allowed companies to even more easily abandon employee pensions.
- It moved retirement savings to the retail financial market, so the financial industry could skim even more from people’s investments than they could when they were in the institutional market of pensions.
- It rewired the brains of the top ~20% of the working class into thinking of themselves as capitalists, against their own class interests
Now they watch corporate news coverage on “the market” and “the economy,” thinking they’re temporarily embarrassed millionaires. - It makes workers blame themselves for their meager retirement savings. If only I had made better investment choices! If only I had contributed more to my 401(k)! (even though they really couldn’t have, because of all the other effects of 40 years of neoliberalism.) Better that they blame themselves than the capitalist class that imposed this bullshit neoliberal system on them.
