This book was the product of research into a problem and activism to resolve it. While I had a background in policy studies to draw upon, I doubt that I would have learned as much about the subset of retirement policy, much less written a book about it, if the Connecticut reform campaign portrayed in chapter 7 had not occurred.
The entire experience of research and activism produced debts to a number of people, with there being no hard wall between the types of help. Marcia P. McGowan, Stephen Adair, Deena Steinberg, Rachel Siporin, Michael Kurland, John Briggs, Jim LoMonaco, and Anne Dawson consistently worked on the Connecticut campaign with critical ideas for strategy and honing of arguments, including on important occasions toning down my public communications.
Timothy Black, Mary Erdmans, Jerry Lembcke, Christopher Doucot, and William Major—friends and members of a writers’ group—offered constructive comments on an early draft.
Ricardo Dello Buono helped me with contacts for my research in Chile. Ximena de la Barra in Chile led me to the symbolic ground zero of international resistance to privatization of retirement accounts. Manuel Riesco from Chile’s Centro de Estudios Nacionales de Desarrollo Alternativo (CENDA) generously shared his vast knowledge of how the Chilean privatized system had spectacularly failed to provide retirement security, despite being considered a model of reform for the rest of the world.
Any type of project like this inevitably requires legal help. Attorneys Leon Rosenblatt and Bernard E. Jacques helped to clarify the strategy for obtaining the retirement reform when most state officials were saying that it couldn’t be done. What is more, they did not charge for their advice when there was no money to pay for it. Kyle Garrett and the very valuable Pension Rights Center gave advice, including the critical referral to attorney Thomas Moukawsher, who in turn provided critical legal help.
We were very lucky to have Daniel E. Livingston as the attorney and chief negotiator for the Connecticut State Employees Bargaining Agent Coalition, which represented state employee unions. Without his skill and commitment, the reform would not have been accomplished and this book would not have been published, since no one would have wanted to read about a reform struggle that failed. Sal Luciano from the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) in Connecticut was also instrumental in lending his prestige and a sympathetic ear to what we were trying to accomplish.
William Cibes lent his vast policy analysis skill to confirm our contentions and then his considerable prestige among state officials to clear the way for the retirement reform we were advocating.
Of all the written materials that I consulted for this work, I found Robin Blackburn’s Banking on Death to be especially useful, as were as his comments on our reform campaign at a 2012 panel in New York on which we served.
Diana “Donnie” McGee from the Massachusetts Teachers Association spent many hours on the phone and in person comparing and analyzing our experience with retirement reform with hers in Massachusetts, where she was leading a parallel campaign. Josh Sword from the American Federation of Teachers in West Virginia generously relayed the experiences of their retirement reform campaign and offered advice for ours.
Scott Mendel, my literary agent, had doubts about publishers being interested in this project, since most of them have 401(k) plans for their own employees. But because reading it made his “blood boil,” he took a risk. Eileen Sheryl Hammer and Mimi Schroeder were early enthusiastic proponents of the project. Joanna Green, my editor at Beacon Press, immediately saw the significance of the book and became a strong advocate for it. She became convinced by and embraced the goals of the book, writing to me at an early point, “I think I’m having a similar (albeit on a smaller scale) experience as you when talking about the 401(k) crisis. There are the looks of disbelief, followed by fear, ending with anger.” She poured all of her belief in the cause as well as editorial skill to make the book as effective as possible. Jane Gebhart sharpened the presentation further with expert copyediting. I have long admired Beacon Press since noting at age eighteen that it was the publisher of James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, which I was reading during breaks from a job selling ice cream bars from the back of a three-wheel motor scooter in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Its strong economic justice mission makes it the perfect press for this book.