Canadian pension fund assets are second in size only to the combined financial assets of the major banks and have become a critical source of capital for national and international markets. Given their tax-exempt status, pension funds can provide the long-term capital needed to build a new economy based on real productivity. The funds are controlled by an intricate web of financial and legal standards but, as deferred wages, are largely beyond the control of workers or their unions.
In Pension Power, Isla Carmichael argues that unions couldand shouldhave a new role to play in the economy by gaining control over their members’ pension funds. She demonstrates how the financial industry's access to the capital goes against the interests of working people, and she provides convincing evidence that union management of pensions would better protect benefits and offer support in building infrastructure in communities and protecting the environment. This is a work of singular commitment to a fundamental shift in the structure of managing one of Canada’s largest pools of capital.

Pension Power: Unions, Pension Funds, and Social Investment in Canada

Business & Money

Carmichael, Isla

Economics

University of Toronto Press

Pension funds have come to play an increasingly important role within the new economy. According to Statistics Canada, in 2006, trusteed pension funds in Canada had $836 billion of assets and represented the savings of 4.6 million Canadian workers. Pensions at Work is a unique collection of papers that uses a labour perspective to deal with the socially responsible investment of pension funds. Featuring leading Canadian and international scholars, it builds on existing scholarship on socially responsible investment and on the growing interest of the Canadian labour movement in joint trusteeship.
 What is unique about this collection is that it synthesizes three distinct themes - socially responsible investment, pension funds, and labour studies. The contributors address an array of critical issues such as gaps in the education of union trustees of pension funds, the impact of human capital criteria on shareholder returns, the influence of corporate engagement upon corporate performance, and the nature of public-private partnerships (PPPs). Although the essays in Pensions at Work all address the nexus between socially responsible investment, pension funds, and unions, each looks at a particular manifestation of that relationship through a different disciplinary lens. This collection moves the discussion to pension funds in which union representatives are also trustees, a relatively new approach that will be of great interest to institutional investors, the labour movement, and instructors in labour studies programs.

Pensions at Work: Socially Responsible Investment of Union-Based Pension Funds

Quarter, Jack

Ryan, Sherida

Money on the Line: Workers Capital in Canada

Canadian Ctr for Policy

Human Resources

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