Workers' Capital Mees, Bernard; Brigden, Cathy
2017, 20200716, 2020-07-16
eBook
Superannuation was once a privilege granted only to company head office staff and career public servants. Now in Australia nearly all workers have access to employer-contributed superannuation, and ...it is a fundamental pillar of Australia's retirement income system.
Workers' Capital tells the story of the Australian superannuation revolution led by trade unions in the 1980s. After a series of hard-fought industrial campaigns, an enormous financial industry was created, involving hundreds of thousands of employers and covering millions of fund members. From having one of the worst retirement savings systems in the developed world, in three decades Australia had one of the best. Now the funds held in Australian superannuation accounts exceed the entire market capitalisation of all the companies on the Australian Stock Exchange.
Drawing on interviews with the key players and extensive archival research, Workers' Capital is the first systematic history of the unique Australian system of industry superannuation.
Several of the bracteates recovered in the nineteenth century from hoards discovered at Skonager and Darum in Jutland feature runic inscriptions that appear to record West Germanic linguistic ...developments. Most of the inscriptions from Iron Age Denmark seem to record language that is directly ancestral to Danish, but two of the bracteates from Skonager and Darum feature inscriptions that have long been thought to attest West Germanic names. A third inscription represented in both hoards may also preserve similar evidence for a West Germanic language spoken in Jutland during the migration period. The inscriptions from Skonager and Darum seem best understood as recording an early Jutish dialect that was distinct from the language spoken further east on Zealand and that was related to the Kentish dialect of Old English.
The names
and
recorded in inscriptions from Namur have long been proposed to preserve evidence that supports the reconstruction of the stem of the Germanic weak class-III verbs as originally ...featuring a diphthong *-
. Cognates of the Gothic weak class-III verb
›to consecrate‹ have similarly been widely held to be preserved in two inscriptions rescued over a century ago from the Danish votive bogs. The attested forms
and
suggest the development of a first-person singular present indicative ending -
, much as would be expected of a weak class-III verb in Northwest Germanic. Gothic
›to consecrate‹ is a factitive, however, and
and
appear to have developed in a manner contrary to that assumed in recent accounts of the morphological origin of the weak class-III verbs.
Representative arrangements are widely employed in the governance of occupational pension funds, particularly in Australia where a sector of jointly employer/employee-sponsored ‘industry funds’ was ...established during the 1980s. The jointly governed industry funds are privately owned wealth-management businesses and have routinely outperformed the retirement-savings schemes run by the large listed for-profit providers. Seeking to understand why these examples of labourist ‘alternative organisations’ have outperformed more traditionally governed Australian wealth-management firms is the main purpose of this article.
The Tune runestone preserves one of the most important older runic inscriptions. Yet two main interpretations have been proposed for the text on side B of the early Norwegian memorial. The more ...recent interpretation relies on the existence of a Proto-Germanic fabricatory verb *
that is not attested otherwise. Side B also features a superlative adjective featuring the ending
whose root has equally been the subject of a range of unlikely proposals. The early runic verb
is most plausibly taken as reflecting a loan of *
, the Celtic reflection of the Indo-European verbal root *
- ‘to divide’, while the superlative appears to be most obviously comparable to Gothic
‘elders’.
At the time of the founding of the industry superannuation funds, the Australian retirement-savings market was dominated by insurance mutuals. In the early 1980s, less than half the workforce was ...covered by occupational superannuation and unions saw the insurance mutuals, created in the nineteenth century, as part of the problem in this widespread market failure. When establishing industry-wide schemes, union leaders largely eschewed the language associated with the “old” mutuals that had become key pillars of the established financial sector. In framing their appeal to members, the trustees and managers of the industry funds appealed instead to new expressions, such as “all profit to members.” Industry funds also developed a model of 50/50 employer/employee trusteeship or “equal representation” not as an ideological prescription, but as a pragmatic way of dealing with opposition to the schemes by employers. The trustees and managers of industry superannuation funds contrasted rather than associated themselves with the “old mutuals” which, at the time, were not seen as reflecting the unions' ideal of an industrial partnership. However, with the decline and demutualisation of the largest old insurance mutuals in the 1990s, the industry funds began to appropriate the language of mutualism. This appropriation took place within the context of a perceived need to maintain a collective identity and purpose in the changing superannuation marketplace.
Abstract
The Vimose plane features an early runic inscription that has long remained opaque, with none of the attempts to explain it having commanded assent in the historiography. Like the ...inscription on the Vimose buckle, however, the text on the wood plane appears to preserve an early example of West Germanic religious language. The inscription on the sharpener shows some parallels with comparable Roman texts but also distinctively West Germanic phonological development. The text on the plane seems to be one of several early runic texts found in the Southern Scandinavian votive bogs that preserve Ingvaeonic features.
Recent studies of private pension provision have stressed the shedding of risk by employers entailed in the international trend away from defined benefit to defined contribution arrangements. In this ...critical literature, the widespread development towards defined contribution schemes is seen as an exclusively poor outcome for employees as financial risk is pushed onto the members of pension plans. These criticisms have essentially been ahistorical - they are not founded in close analyses of the reforms of the relevant pension arrangements. The first country to undertake a major change from defined benefit (or benefit promise) to defined contribution (or accumulation) plans was Australia. A closer historical examination of the shift suggests that the considerable reforms in occupational pension schemes of the 1980s and 1990s cannot validly be seen, overall, as a regressive outcome for Australian workers. Three fundamental features of the reform of white-collar superannuation emerge from a close historical analysis. First, considerable simplification transpired in what previously had been a largely opaque system of retirement benefits provision. Second, there was a fixing of employer costs in light of the adoption of accrual accounting and an increasing drain on taxpayer funds in public sector schemes. Third, clear evidence of improved financial performance occurred during the reforms.
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