Land of Broken Promises: Classification Struggles and the Reorganization of Municipal Pensions in Detroit's Bankruptcy
Hyman, Mikell
2018
Abstract
How were Detroit's municipal pensions converted from a contractual right to a charitable gift? The erosion of economic benefits is a familiar trope. Yet Detroit’s 2013 bankruptcy was exploited not just to shift risk onto active workers, but also to revoke promises made to people who had already earned their benefits, including over twenty thousand individuals who had already retired. The profound rigidity of the welfare state’s ideological foundation is part of what makes this particular shift so puzzling. Cultural categories of worth run like fault lines through the entire history of American social provision. Since the colonial era the same set of categories has been used to sort between those more and less deserving of state protection against key economic risks. Americans who contribute to society through formal labor force participation earn access to social insurance programs. Others may receive more limited forms of public assistance, decried as charity, i.e. as “something for nothing.” Thus, what is at stake in the definition of the pension promise is the status and rights of recipients. Prior research finds this framework to be so inflexible that it has stymied efforts to expand social provision that would erase the symbolic and programmatic boundaries between these categories. The key contribution of this dissertation is to show that the ostensibly inflexible categories of contract and charity are more malleable and fluid than previously thought. Drawing on an “eventful analysis” of Detroit’s municipal bankruptcy, I find that in crisis moments, classification struggles may reconfigure categories of worth in significant and durable ways. The empirical chapters of the dissertation use archival, observational, and interview data to trace three classification struggles in which the meaning of the pension promise and the deservingness of active and retired workers with accrued pension benefits was reevaluated in relation to other subsets of city stakeholders. In the first episode, pensions were redefined as undeserving contracts and deprioritized in relation to a majority of bondholders. Influential legal actors reinterpreted pensions from compensation to credit, causing pensions to fall through the conceptual cracks of the bankruptcy code. In the second episode, the introduction of a charitable gift led pensions to be prioritized over a subset of bonds, repositioning pensioners as deserving dependents. Here, influential legal actors publicly framed the intervention in an ambiguous fashion, making it possible for foundations to privately attach different meanings and cooperate despite diverging goals. In the third episode, the pension system was stabilized in its new form. The city used the charitable gift to draw finer grained distinctions between subsets of pension beneficiaries. Trusted retiree representatives reworked the self-concept of beneficiaries in order to secure their public acceptance. Cumulatively, these episodic reevaluations culminated in a durable shift in the pension financing mechanism that blurred the programmatic and symbolic boundaries between contract and charity. I argue that the underlying conceptual and institutional heterogeneity of key categories are what make social policies the site of definitional disputes, and also what structure the limits of their reinterpretation. Social reproduction results from the ongoing interaction between how people think about, talk about, and organize social provision. Influential actors who seize on the latent conceptual and institutional affordances of these categories in in ways that resonate with the broader social and historical climate may be able reconfigure prevailing categories of worth in durable ways.Subjects
City of Detroit Bankruptcy
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