Empty Promises: Why Workplace Pension Law Doesn’t Deliver Pensions, By Elizabeth J. Shilton (2016) Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 304 pages. ISBN: 978-0-7735-4787-2

The title of this book is both attractive and puzzling. It attracts attention because it is rare to state such a sharp opinion about private pension funds, which are in a delicate situation in Canada. Most of the population does not have access to a defined benefits pension plan but would like to, because it is recognized for its offering of secured rents for retirees. Saying that defined benefits pension plans are empty promises is quite depressing and unfair in the context of the Canadian retirement system. The title of the book is puzzling because workplace pensions are usually set in the context of collective bargaining and supervised by regulatory authorities–federal and provincial–which are protected by several laws. Saying that workplace pension plans are not delivering pensions suggest that this industry is, in the majority, in an illegal situation or that workplace pension law is inefficient. The title stays in mind during the entire reading of this book, reconstructing the demonstration of empty promises across the chapters. The elements of the demonstration are not new in pension literature. Quebec readers will not find much in common with the author’s perspective because of Quebec’s pension system specifics (unions’ savings plans and workplace pension model, sovereign fund and pension management authority in the public sector, multi-employer workplace pensions, and sectoral pension funds). Nevertheless, it is interesting to have a synthesis of reflexions about pensions from a highly experienced practitioner. Chapter 5 to 8, for example, are very well documented and each judicial decision placed in its own particular context. The book is probably not accessible for non-specialists of Canadian pension’s system without a solid judicial background. Unfortunately, there is no presentation of the present situation of pension funds system in Canada to introduce main debates about pension. Industrial relations academics and professionals may be interested by the analysis of jurisprudence and Supreme Court decisions. It is nonetheless necessary to recognize that the judicial aspect is usually decisive in case of conflict about workplace pensions. The problem lies in many statements, usually discussed more thoroughly in the literature, which are presented as definitions at the beginning of the book: the system is a “voluntary system”, established by employers because a “business system demanded a stable workforce of loyal, well-trained employees”; “a trend away from plans that pay guaranteed benefits, towards capital accumulation (CAP) plans”; “Canada is unusually dependent, by international standards, on the workplace pension system as a mechanism for delivering retirement income”; “this book focuses primarily on a model in which the plan is ‘sponsored’ by a single employer”(p. 3-14). All these elements should have been documented with secondary literature and statistics because, for all of them, the devil is in the detail, and a more social sciences multi-disciplinary perspective would have been necessary to reinforce the premises of the demonstration. The theoretical developments in the book about “pension’s relation” are interesting and well written. Workplace pension law’s historical evolution is influenced by different approaches, from proprietary right to employment contract and gift. The important idea is that the workplace pension is a hybrid concept between social security, trust law, and administrative (labour) law. The term hybrid means that you cannot separate these elements without changing the purpose of the concept and the evaluation of its efficiency. Hybrid also means that conflicts about the signification of workplace pensions are the main driving force behind its development. The analysis of the conflicts, from a judicial point of view, is a clear realisation of this book. While reading it, we may be tempted to go a step further from conflicts to collective action and …