By Robert F. Abbott
Watching the protests and riots staged to coincide with the G-20 Forum in the United Kingdom might tempt you to view this as another battle in the long-running war between capital and labor. But, that's not true.
Working people, through their pension funds and mutual funds, now own a majority of stocks in most big corporations. And when these corporations pay out their profits, much of that profit goes toward funding the pensions and other retirement income of middle class people who would call themselves working people.
In fact, among working people with a stake in big business, through their pension funds and mutual funds, members of trade unions are among the biggest owners. They enjoy that status because they not only contribute to pension funds themselves, but also because their employers often match their contributions. That means they have either bigger pensions, or that they have extra disposable income they can invest in mutual funds.
The demonstrators at the G20 Forum, including the labor people who've taken to the streets of London, would have you believe otherwise. But, they're sadly out of date, protesting in support of a separation between business and labor that's disappearing rapidly.
This disappearing separation, through ownership of corporations, began in a small way in a handful of countries after World War II. Since then, the growth of worker ownership through pension and mutual funds had both expanded and accelerated. Now, literally hundreds of millions of working people around the globe participate.
The health of big business now matters, despite what you might hear from protestors at the G20 Forum. Even in these difficult days, corporate earnings add significantly to the retirement incomes. Few of us would want to retire on just government pensions, and thanks to our investments in big business, few of us have to.
We might now argue that what we're now seeing is an increasing convergence between the interests of working people and those of business. After all, if a company doesn't earn profits, it will not pay dividends or otherwise increase the wealth of the working people whose funds invested in it.
In the past, we saw a limited convergence based on their shared survival, as is now the case with General Motors and the unions representing its employees. But, as we know from history, without threats to their common survival, unions and businesses fought with each other, often bitterly. And it's that history you see reflected in the streets of London, outside the G20 Forum.
In the new order of labor and business relationships, though, the two sides also share the profits. And that leads to a different dynamic than the one we see at the G20 Forum.
So, the ownership of big corporations has been good for working people, including members of unions. However, it hasn't been so good for left-wing politicians, activists, and the union people who support them. It's essentially robbed them of their most meaningful reason for existing. But, we can hardly expect them to grasp that any time soon, especially if they spend their time raging at events like the G20 Forum, rather than reading in their local libraries.
Robert F. Abbott is writing a book that explains how working people became the owners of big business, including how a Wall Street bailout can also be a Main Street bailout. Read excerpts from the book at TheNewOwners.com
Source:www.isnare.com |
