About this item
When Steven Burd, CEO of the supermarket chain Safeway, cut wages and benefits, starting a five-month strike by 59,000 unionized workers, he was confident he would win. But where traditional labor action failed, a novel approach was more successful. With the aid of the California Public Employees' Retirement System, a $300 billion pension fund, workers led a shareholder revolt that unseated three of Burd's boardroom allies.In The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder: Labor's Last Best Weapon, David Webber uses cases such as Safeway's to shine a light on labor's most potent remaining weapon: its multitrillion-dollar pension funds. Outmaneuvered at the bargaining table and under constant assault in Washington, state houses, and the courts, worker organizations are beginning to exercise muscle through markets.
About the Author
David H. Webber is the author of The Rise of the Working Class Shareholder: Labor's Last Best Weapon, published by Harvard University Press in April 2018. He has published op-eds about the book in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. It has also been reviewed or otherwise covered in the New York Review of Books, the Financial Times, Publisher's Weekly, Bloomberg Radio, CSPAN's BookTV, Forbes, the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, the Harvard OnLabor blog, Cornell University's ILR Review, Rorotoko, de Volkskrant, Calcalist, Splinter News, and Dissent. Webber has also been interviewed on a range of corporate governance matters by Nightly Business Report and NPR's Marketplace.Webber is a law professor at Boston University School of Law. He lives outside Boston with his family.
