[shevis]

This is yet another symptom of shareholders becoming the primary customer. The strong incentive for short-term profit results in strategic decision-making that is both financially riskier and more ethically dubious in the long term.

[soundsgoodtome]

Ok. Do you realize that most of us are the shareholders? This is a Fortune 500 company. Most of our 401ks include blended Fortune 500 holdings.

I keep hearing this rhetoric around social media… Do people not realize that there is a cost to our retirement funds always having to increase in value?

[UncleMeat]

I think this outcome was unintentional, but in hindsight this feels like the greatest trick megacapitalism ever pulled.

A disproportionate amount of equity growth goes to the wealthy but the middle class has also hitched their futures to the stock market through 401ks. This means that "well, grandma's retirement also depends on record corporate profits" is a nearly invincible tactic against anything that diminishes corporate profits. The folks that own a disproportionate amount of equities get to untouchably balloon their wealth and there is nothing to stop them because stopping them would mean blowing up a generation's retirement plan.

[sangnoir]

The outcome was not unintentional. The current moves overtures to privatize Social Security will seal the complete subservience of labor to capital. "If our share price drops, retirees will freeze to death on empty stomachs - not even the government can help"

[UncleMeat]

I'm not sure. 401ks were not an accident when they were introduced, but it doesn't appear that any of their architects intended for them to completely revolutionize and take over the retirement system in the US.

I do agree that now it is an organized effort by capital and that efforts to move social security to a system similar to private 401k accounts (which has been pushed by the right since before W Bush) would absolutely do what you say - seal the complete subservience of labor to capital. I just think that this was an opportunity seized by capital rather than a change planned from the beginning.

[TomSwirly]

> Do you realize that most of us are the shareholders? [...] Most of our 401ks

Only 60 million Americans have a 401k.

Also, the idea that an American owning a portfolio of stocks in a 401k means that they are responsible for all the immoral actions taken by each company is absolutely and totally ridiculous.

[wpm]

Hey champ if my 401k earning slightly less means not chem-Chernobyling small town USA or working people to death, that’s fine by me.

[eurasiantiger]

I’d bet there is an industry of white collar traders getting rich off the 401k mechanism, never putting in a dime of their own money.