Louisiana in New York (Times, that is)

By: Robert F. Abbott, author of Big Macs & Our Pensions: Who Gets McDonald's Profits?

Friday, February 7, 2014

Did you know that many Louisiana state employees own a piece of the New York Times? Not exactly two names you'd put together intuitively, but pensions, like politics, makes for strange bedfellows.

And while we might think of the Times as a newspaper, it's defining itself more broadly, as printed newspapers keep ceding ground to digital initiatives. It describes itself this way at its website, "The New York Times Company is a global media organization dedicated to enhancing society by creating, collecting and distributing high-quality news and information."

The company announced its fourth quarter and full year 2013 results yesterday, Here's how it described the full year results in a news release, "...the Company had an operating profit of $156.1 million compared to $103.7 million in 2012. Excluding depreciation, amortization, severance and special items, operating profit in 2013 grew to $256.3 million from $245.2 million in 2012."

That should please members of the Louisiana State Employees' Retirement System (LASERS), which owned 34,400 of the company's publicly traded shares on December 31st (based on data supplied at nasdaq.com).

Here's how LASERS describes its membership,

"The Louisiana State Employees' Retirement System (LASERS) provides defined benefit plans for various categories of members:

• Regular State Employees
• Hazardous Duty Services
• Correctional Officers
• Wildlife Agents
• Peace Officers
• Bridge Police for the Crescent City Connection (DOTD)
• Alcohol and Tobacco Agents for the Department of Revenue
• Certain State Legislative Officers and Elected Officials
• Judges and Court Officers

"Our membership totals over 150,000 active, inactive, and retired members."

According to nasdaq.com, more than 79% of the New York Times' 149 million shares are owned by institutional investors (primarily mutual funds and pension funds).

The Bigger Picture:

Will Profits from Big Macs Add to Your Retirement Income?

In 1948, the McDonald brothers redesigned and remodelled their drive-in restaurant in San Bernardino, California. Taking inspiration from Henry Ford's assembly-line, they created the fast food revolution, with the quick service and low prices we now take for granted.

In that same year, the U.S. National Labor Relations Board ruled unions could include pension issues in contract negotiations. That ignited a massive expansion of pension plans.

In the 1950s, pension funds started buying stocks, rather than just bonds or their equivalents; in addition mutual funds came of age. With these two developments working, middle class people became owners of big business. At first, their stakes were modest, but steadily growing.

And in just a few decades, they gained controlling interests in many large corporations through their funds. Management guru Peter Drucker has called it, "...one of the most startling power shifts in economic history."

Now, working people reap the benefits of those investments, collecting much of the profit distributed by McDonald's and other big corporations.

Discover how the pieces fit together. In Big Macs & Our Pensions: Who Gets McDonald's Profits? - a new booklet -(about 25-pages), you will:

• learn more about the McDonald's transformation and its implications for the future
  
• find out how McDonald's makes its profits (and it involves more than selling Quarter Pounders)
  
• meet some of the working people who get McDonald's profits through their pension and mutual funds
  
• find out how low wages became embedded in the fast food industry
  
• hear accusations from critics of McDonald's wages, and
  
• learn who has the ultimate say on fast food wages (the answer may surprise you).

You may not be among the owners of McDonald's. But if you belong to any pension plan, or contribute to a mutual fund or whole life insurance policy, you likely own pieces of some big corporations.

More importantly, though, your retirement income will be bigger and grow more dependably than you would otherwise expect.

Big Macs & Our Pensions: Who Gets McDonald's Profits? is now available at Amazon.com