retirement ethics

As you might expect of a leftie girl, I'm not keen on the world of the sharemarket and of large corporates. I'm not keen on structures in which working people are paid as little as possible in order to maximise returns for totally absent persons known as 'shareholders'. I believe financial returns should be for productive work, not merely for already having money.

And this has led me to ponder the ethics of retirement funds. As far as I can work out, plans like Kiwisaver, involve 'investment' of my funds and then when I'm much older, those funds will be worth more and thus will pay for me to live when I am no longer able to work productively myself.

So where is all this productivity margin going to come from? If myself and all other supposedly sensible people in wealthy countries invest in funds which are the product of someone else's not fully recompensed toil... this is where I'm at in my thinking. Something doesn't feel right. In my view, I already use and abuse working people all over the world when I purchase items made with exploitative labour. This gives me a level of unsease which I try to deal with by making careful and somewhat minimal purchases and also by refusing to let the issue and it's magnititude so swamp me that I give up and do nothing about fair trade/ethical shopping/reducing consumption.

I think a turning point for me on this topic was listening to the National Radio one weekday lunchtime and hearing matter of fact discussions about investment in retirement homes. If we can put aside the irony of possibly investing in retirement homes businesses in order to fund my own retirement, What concerned me was such a business being run at a profit. It more than concerned me, it made me feel sick. And it still does.

I don't have answers, but I certainly have questions.