Pension trustees do not generally invest workers' retirement money themselves, but farm it out to professional money managers.
A new report from investor watchdog ShareAction shows that success has created a new challenge: ensuring there is proper oversight of how companies invest workers' money.
(By the way, how'd that NFL experiment turn out?) The critical thing here is that once a strike is settled -- win, lose, or draw -- the full-time, invested workers get their jobs back, and the temporary workers leave.
In an essay about her experience in Gunn BEAM, a student in the program wrote: "I'm learning skills that are highly applicable...and we're a team of enthusiastic optimists and invested workers.
This morning, we found out that in the second quarter of this year our economy grew at a strong pace, and businesses are investing, workers are building new homes, consumers are spending, America is exporting goods around the world.
They got a boost in 2006 when the federal Labor Department allowed employers to invest worker retirement assets in target-date funds as a default option in company 401(k) plans.
Reich describes this as an example of a "virtuous circle" in which productivity grows, wages increase, workers buy more, companies hire more, tax revenues increase, government invests more, workers are better educated.
Rather than squeezing workers, they could have invested in workers and boosted product quality, taking what economists call the high road toward more advanced manufacturing and skilled service work.
This leads to self-fulfilling prophecies where employers do not invest in workers, expecting that they will not exert enough effort, and workers fulfill these expectations by rationally anticipating very low promotion prospects.
These employers don't want to invest in workers if they don't have to.
