Agree with you on this one, sort of lost touch with the orginal post about pensions, seems everybody is counting on the 401K as a ways out. Do not count on that either, you only have assess to those funds when the people in control of your money dictates. That means the IRS, fund trustees or federal oversight agencies can change the rules when they want to, for example raising the age requirement from 60 to 70, increasing the early penalty withdraw to maybe 30 percent. You are going to pay that tax man no matter how clever we think we are. This UPS/Teamster 401K plan was started in around l988, most of us who orginally joined from it's conception will not have sufficent funds to collect to forfeit any reasonable pension benefit. I am hoping to have enought to pay off my mortgage with a pray of being able to live off my monthly pension.
Study the contract lanuage on how our pensions are formulated, the increases in our pension and health and welfare contribuions are in lieu of a hourly wage increase. That money is technically ours, what the company or union does with it is a matter of record. That of course is the matter of the current pension fiasco, what happen to the contributions if they were ever paid in some cases?
The people who are crying the most over this problem will be the ones who put their time in and were planning to retire at a reasonable age and in good health. We paid our dues along with our management co-workers to make this company profitable and currently the only ones who seem to be enjoying early retirement with financial security are our managers and union officials. Bottom line that this pension crisis is not the same as those airline companies that dropped their pension responsbilities on the federal government. This Company has been profitable for decades, the money is there. What I see is the common employee being trampled into ground by company and union fighting over who has control of those funds and the power associate with it.
Is there a change going on now, has the scale for corporate profit and it's perks been tilted to far in their favor. Just recently President Bush brought up the fact about the overcompensation of CEO executives, golden parachutes I believed they are called. Just read of a disposed CEO for home depot collecting a severance package of over 100 million dollars for basically doing a bad job, made me sick considering the abusive nature of middle americans are being raked over the coals with underfunded pensions and cutting health and welfare benefits.
What unions will do with this apparent change of balance we all have to see, they can take the easy road of business as usual or make a stand over this apparent injustice and take the high road. Maybe this confrontation will wake up the apathy that many of have over why unions were created in the first place
