Abstract

In 1985, the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System and Ontario Teachers Pension Plan had asset values of around $10 billion apiece. Thirty-five years later, and both now hold portfolios of well over $100 billion. As major players in the global system of rentier capitalism, both have built up significant real estate portfolios, linking the retirements of their beneficiaries to a global housing crisis. At the same time as this has occurred, their beneficiaries – Ontario’s public sector workers – have come under increased pressure from the state as the targets of austerity and anti-welfare politics. Their pensions are invested in the same economic system that is targeting them for destruction. This thesis posits that this is not coincidental, but rather is the result of intertwined processes of welfare, labour, and economic restructuring under the umbrella of deindustrialization and neoliberalization. The marketization of pensions, the public-sectorization of the labour movement, and the hyper-commodification of housing are all linked together as part of capital’s conquest of social reproduction. I tell this story by linking Ontario’s pension reforms in the late-1980s to the attack on public sector labour and welfare waged by successive provincial and local governments into the present. I then try to consider what the options are for the labour movement to break this contradiction.