Wage-earners are both workers and capital owners under financialization

Evidence

What’s at stake in this scholarship, therefore, is not just doing justice to these ‘varieties of financialization’, but also explicating the possibilities for agency by local actors, when financial imperatives are gradually becoming more important in the political economy. Financialization studies have successfully drawn attention to the myriad ways in which economic actors participate in financial markets. This applies not only to managers and shareholders, whose compensation is tied to the financial performance of the firm, but also to wage-earners and their households. Whether through capital-funded pension schemes, employee stock ownership plans or home mortgages, wage-earners increasingly rely on financial markets for the provision of social goods. Yet while wage-earners’ financial market participation presents an interesting paradox for scholarly analysis (Ghilarducci et al., 1997), financialization scholars tend to privilege wage-earners’ employment position when discussing the consequences of financialization on wage levels and job security. In these portrayals of financialization as a shift in power from labour to capital, wage-earners come across as victims of finance, even though they may benefit from value-maximizing corporate policies as owners of capital. — Natascha van der Zwan, Making Sense of Financialization, 102

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘split identities’ of wage-earners as worker-owners, the core tension under critique.
• XREF: Connects to the ‘varieties of capitalism’ and power-from-labour-to-capital debates, and to the labour-vs-capital shift motif echoed across political economy. — connects to: Financial income reallocates resources away from workers and strengthens owner bargaining power; The financier embodies an ideal of leveraged precariousness imposed on all workers — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 187; The career portfolio externalizes risk onto workers while capital reaps the rewards. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 455 (+3 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Natascha van der Zwan, Making Sense of Financialization, 102

Related

• Financialization may erode the postwar capital-labor social pact (similarity 0.79)