Sanford Jacoby has long pioneered work to bridge the divide between labor and business history. His remarkable study of welfare capitalism in the years after the New Deal (Modern Manors, 1997) reshaped the field in its pathbreaking vision of the ways that managers and employers altered labor relations strategies to respond to the demands and pressures of organized labor. His edited volume titled Masters to Managers (1991) also brought together a brilliant collection of essays organized around the changing vision and viewpoint of management throughout American history.
His latest book, Labor in the Age of Finance, similarly introduces questions that will guide the work of scholars for some time to come. In contrast to his earlier work, this book draws less on deep archival research and thus leaves many questions open for further investigation. But the line of inquiry that Jacoby raises in this important volume will give historians ample space to work in the future.
Rather than focus on managerial structures or employee relations departments, as Jacoby covered in his earlier writing, this book is a measure of the transformation of capitalism in the late twentieth century because it emphasizes the way that labor unions have had to contend with changing forms of corporate ownership. At the heart of Labor in the Age of Finance is an investigation of what Jacoby calls “labor’s financial turn” (p. 1). This is the unions’ efforts to control their pension funds to bolster their declining membership between the 1970s and the early 2000s—decades of “disaster” for organized labor, as he puts it. The growing importance of finance in the overall economy and the deepening public identification with stockholders as opposed to workers might appear to be a weakness for labor over these years. But Jacoby suggests that union leaders sought to turn it into a strength. Financial strategies were, he argues, one means by which labor sought to counter the myriad problems that unions faced in the late twentieth century, as they encountered increasingly hostile political and economic climates.
Jacoby takes what might have been a narrow exploration of the shareholder activism of public workers’ pension funds and of multi-employer pension funds (common in the building trades, where smaller employers contribute to a common pension fund that is then controlled in part by the union) and uses it as a lens to explore the contradictory ideas and visions of ownership in the late twentieth century. In the middle years of the twentieth century, corporate ownership was largely divorced from corporate control. Stock was owned by a disparate group of investors who rarely exerted their power directly over the chief executives responsible for day-to-day decisions. In the 1960s and 1970s, this changed—in part because community activists such as Saul Alinsky began to use shareholder resolutions as one tactic among many to pressure companies for change and, more deeply—because of a revolution in financial economics that insisted shareholder value should be the sole responsibility of the company, and that investors should mobilize to reject any executives who failed to deliver on this.
For labor unions to become activist shareholders meant giving up on one set of strategies focused on shop-floor power (most importantly strikes) and instead emphasizing labor as an investor. In practice, unions tended to make use of shareholder campaigns as part of “corporate campaigns” aimed at targeting the public image of a company and rallying political and consumer support. Nonetheless, emphasizing labor’s power as an investor marked a critical rhetorical and political shift.
Jacoby demonstrates that these strategies became popular among many unions in the late twentieth century, from the Hotel and Restaurant Employees to the CALPERS (the pension fund for California’s public employees). Perhaps the most striking part of Jacoby’s book is the chapter in which he details the efforts of the AFL-CIO to develop financial strategies during the 1990s, when the union federation established the Center for Working Capital and the Office of Investment to help guide unions in making financial decisions and to encourage some set of common values and principles. Many of the labor leaders involved in these efforts were the same associated with Andy Stern of the Service Employees International Union, John Wilhelm of UNITE HERE, and the turn of the AFL-CIO under John Sweeney to a more organizing-oriented approach—a new generation of labor leadership committed to finding ways to reverse labor’s decline and rebuild union power—to some extent laying the foundation for the labor activism of the present day. But what were the long-term political and ideological implications of emphasizing unions’ roles as shareholders?
Labor in the Age of Finance covers the increasingly fraught nature of this shareholder activism in the early 2000s, when the steadily climbing stock values of the 1990s were replaced by Enron, the financial meltdown of 2008, and Occupy Wall Street. It was one thing to argue that unions should use their power as investors when the stock market was rising and the economy growing—but as the impact of the financial shift on working-class people became clear, the entire project started to seem more questionable. Could workers really exert power as investors without undercutting their own independent claims? Were the interests of investors really the same as those of unions? This tension comes out especially clearly in the chapter on private equity. Public employee unions seeking to make up funding shortfalls have been major investors in private equity funds—even though private equity often generates profits through layoffs and speed-up that rarely benefits workers. In the end, the decision to avoid what is at heart a political problem of pension underfunding through investment in private equity only highlights the contradictions of the strategy.
The capaciousness of Jacoby’s book is also its weakness. Ranging over many years and efforts at financial reform, Jacoby does not do the deep dive into union or pension fund archives (which may not have been available) that might allow him to see how union leaders tried to grapple with the challenges of their strategies, or the possible tensions that might have simmered behind the scenes. The broad question of how unions emerged as financial actors and what they did with their capital once they had it can be traced back to earlier in the postwar years—a story that Jacoby does not tell. Nor does he explore the ways that ordinary union members might have thought about or perceived the issues at stake. The reality is that financial strategies were appealing to unions—but only successful in limited ways, and ultimately in ways that may have undercut the organizing that would be the only real chance for rebuilding strength and relevance. Despite these limits, Jacoby’s fine book, by raising these issues, has opened a path and set out a conceptual framework for future archival work.
Professor Phillips-Fein is a historian of twentieth-century American politics and political economy, whose interests include the history of political institutions and ideas, the history of labor and capitalism, and the history of New York City. She is the author of Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (2009) and Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics (2017).
