The Labor Guide to Retirement Plans

James Russell’s The Labor Guide to Retirement Plans: For Union Organizers and Employees (Monthly Review Press, 2021) is a helpful how-to for workers navigating their retirement and pension options, from the labor organizer's perspective. Researching retirement plans should not take the rest of your life, even if deciphering the relevant paperwork seems to have become a full-time job. Deliberately elaborate legalese is obscuring the efforts of financial elites to seize control of workers' collective retirement savings—and The Labor Guide to Retirement Plans is here to translate. This nuts-and-bolts book provides a much-needed demystification of the retirement system. Even more than that The Labor Guide to Retirement Plans enables us to take charge of our own personal futures, as a first step towards taking back what belongs to us all.

Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.