The state of the American retirement system is not good. Pension funds are constantly being whittled away, workers who are lucky enough to have funds increasingly receive 401(k) plans that are subject to the wild fluctuations of the market, and free-market vultures continue to circle around the social security system — a terrifying prospect in a country where 45 percent of households don’t have any retirement savings at all.

How did we get to this situation? To find out, Jacobin‘s Micah Uetricht spoke with Mike McCarthy, the author of Dismantling Solidarity: Capitalist Politics and American Pensions Since the New Deal. At a public event in Chicago, they discussed unions’ role in the development of the welfare state, to the successful efforts to keep control of pension fund investments out of unions’ hands, and the decline in an already meager retirement system.