Pension Fund City: Retirement, Real Estate, and Public Sector Labour
Bibliographic record
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".