60 Years of PSCA

It’s about more than retirement

In 1947, fewer than 2,000 employers sponsored defined contribution plans. Today nearly 700,000 do. From its inception, PSCA has encouraged employers to sponsor profit sharing — and later 401(k) programs — and has worked successfully to insure a regulatory environment that encourages them to do so.

The question is: why has the small fraction of the American business community that is PSCA committed so much money and time to this effort? It’s because PSCA is, and always has been, a community of special people. Many company leaders say their employees are valued partners in their business enterprise. PSCA members not only say it, they mean it; and they want other company leaders to mean it too. PSCA members believe in partnership in the workplace. Helping their employees build retirement wealth by sponsoring a defined contribution plan is one way their belief is translated into reality.

In the past, discussions about organizing the workplace were dominated by Taylorism and Marxism. Taylorism, or industrial engineering, views the organization and its operation as compartmentalized job segments and workers as interchangeable components who perform in a standardized way under strict supervision. Karl Marx taught that laborers and owners are adversaries in a constant struggle for advantage in a zero-sum game. From the beginning, PSCA members rejected both ideas. It is fundamental to PSCA that the workplace is a dynamic partnership between workers and the employer based on mutual self-interest.

Through the years, PSCA also has been committed to capitalism and respect for the individual. At the meeting that resulted in the formation of PSCA, Professor Robert Hartman said “The greatest natural resource of this, as of any country, is [the individual].” At PSCA’s founding, The Wall Street Journal reported that PSCA’s purpose was “to strengthen free enterprise by extending profit sharing in industry, spread prosperity through higher buying power and lower prices, and attain industrial peace by applying ethical principles to human relations in industry.”

The concept of worker capitalism has recently been discussed at the highest policymaker levels. However, it was PSCA’s founders who believed that workers who had knowledge of how the capitalistic system worked and were able to tap the wealth it generated would feel no solidarity for Marxism’s goal of uniting workers against their employers and the thus save the free world from Communism. Defined contribution plan participants are worker capitalists building greater wealth in their plans than most had ever dreamed possible.

The world is a very different place today than in 1947. No longer is Communism a threat, and the goal of employer-sponsored defined contribution plans is building retirement wealth for workers who will have a lifespan of 90 years or more.

Nevertheless, the special group who is PSCA remains committed to strengthening the free-enterprise system, empowering and motivating the workforce, improving domestic and international competitiveness and, by the way, helping workers build an important source of retirement income.