ABSTRACT

A Canadian TV advertising campaign for life insurance, popular in the 1980s and 1990s, assuaged the worries of would-be retirees with the soothing promise of “Freedom 55.” In these commercials, a friendly voiceover prompts: “Imagine you had the power to visit yourself in the future.” A somewhat harried, middle-aged professional man is then magically transported from “the rat race” to an idyllic locale, such as a yacht or beach-side promenade, where a smug, older version of himself explains how a London Life insurance policy gave him the freedom to retire early and still comfortably provide for his family. Significantly, these commercials emerged in a decade when the Western, Fordist ideals of life-long employment with a single company guaranteeing stable retirement income as a reward for loyal service were succumbing to the pressures of globalization. Among the processes that challenged the ideal of secure futurity were neoliberal economic models that targeted retirement funds and many other forms of socialized wealth as sites for generating private profits. Not only were financial managers increasingly investing pension funds in volatile but potentially more lucrative corporate securities (instead of stable but lower-yield government bonds), but with mounting capital flight, corporate mergers and downsizing, workers in North America and Europe were often pressured into making “give-backs” and relinquishing large portions of retirement and other benefits in order to save their jobs.2