Invested in Crisis: Public Sector Pensions Against the Future

by Tom Fraser

All workers deserve access to a safe and secure retirement. But neoliberal governments set up a dynamic where the retirement of some is predicated upon the exploitation of many. In the late-1980s, Ontario’s government, financial sector, and labour movement collaborated on a major restructuring of the province’s public sector pensions. The result? The unlocking of a vault containing billions of dollars, suddenly open to be privately invested in capital markets. All this occurred as Ontario’s manufacturing economy got smaller, its care economy got bigger, and its labour movement got weaker. 

In Invested in Crisis, Tom Fraser traces the rise of the province’s mega-pension-funds by melding history, geography, and political economy to situate this growth in the context of Ontario’s deindustrialization, the rise of finance, and the global politics of the built environment. Fraser delves deep into the sordid stories of the public sector pension fund investment the massive real estate projects, the infrastructure privatization debacles, how unions fight back, and what needs to be done so we can all save for a better future.

Genres: Economics

128 pages, Paperback

Published February 25, 2025

Reviews

[Donald]

Pension mega-investors have become a core part of Canadian capitalism in the past few decades. For radicals this creates a mess that is difficult to tidy up. Pension funds of unionized workers in Ontario control tens of billions of dollars. Their investments include privatized infrastructure and major real estate holdings. This short book tries to lay out some of the absurdities this creates for the labour movement and some of the ideological muck that surrounds big pension investing. Labour invests in the same structures that work to undermine the position of labour, facilitating the privatization of utilities for governments and driving the financialization of real estate. The difficulties for transforming all this can only be hinted at, such as the limitations of trying to make pension funds good climate citizens. There is some good history here for Ontario left-wing types to work through.

[Jacob Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant and concise analysis. Fraser does his best to help the labour movement steer out of a blind corner and get back on a path of social transformation, and in large part, his closing chapters constitute a seemingly modest proposal with deep ramifications for the future of trade unionism, urbanism, and struggles over social reproduction.

As someone researching and writing on this very same topic, my minor theoretical quibbles are of no concern. They are of no consequence to this book at all. Run, do not walk, to buy this book, if you are looking to try and resolve the contradictions of 'pension fund capitalism', and build a better world.