Professor Bainbridge talks about union run pension funds looking to get greater representation on company boards in the States. This highlights one of the huge differences between UK and US practices, specifically, who runs the pension fund ?
There are union run pension funds in the UK, but they are limited to those direct employees of the union, full time organisers and the like. Unions may negotiate with management over pension rights , but they don’t ever control the pension funds of regular union members, those who are employed by the companies the union is negotiating with.
In the US the situation can be vastly different. It can be the union itself that runs the pension pot out of which future pensions for ordinary members will be paid. So one can have, as the Professor notes, militant unionists investing squillions of billions of pension funds in very strange ways. Not just the case that he refers to, with all the associated agency problems, but there was a recent hoo haw about Terry McAuliffe getting a sweetheart deal with a Florida land speculation, funded by exactly one of those union controlled pension pots.
The Teamster’s pension plan has been a byword for this sort of shenanigans for decades, as Jimmy Hoffa could tell us, wherever he is.