MrFedEx
Engorged Member
Bingo. FedEx pays you peanuts, and then says self-fund your retirement when you can't afford to do so on what you're being paid.
Retirement information meeting
- Thread starter Operational needs
- Start date
Bingo. FedEx pays you peanuts, and then says self-fund your retirement when you can't afford to do so on what you're being paid.
All a ground contractor can hope for from a pension perspective is to try to gather up some cash ,throw it in the market and hope for the best. For too long many contractors have believed that their retirement will be financed by their ability to sell their routes for a king's ransom then live out their lives in splendor. That dream is rapidly fading as the investor class continues to leave. The situation at ground made worse by the fact that few contractors provide anything in the way of benefits to their employees including pension contributions. In addition employee pension obligations of many states governments are badly underfunded and at Ground contractors are not retired. They're disposed of and sadly the same corporate attitude exits toward X employees . For generations the primary constituency of the GOP has been the nation's wealthy elite. Now both parties depend on that segment of the population for campaign cash and tailor their platforms accordingly.
!Retired!
Well-Known Member
I never said there shouldn't be a pension or SS. If I get a pension, fine. If I get SS, fine. Companies are not REQUIRED to give you a pension. Whatever I get from those 2 I consider a bonus, not my sole source of income when I retire. In case, you haven't noticed, companies, for the most part, do pay as little as they can get away with, be it union, non-union, office job, management, etc. If they paid to little, they wouldn't have employees. It's MY responsibility how to live and save on what I get paid, not FedEx's. I want a new truck. CAN I buy one? Yes. Does it make sense financially? No, and I know it. Not because of what FedEx pays me, but because I take that money and put in my retirement fund. My wife quit her job to go back to school. So, effective tomorrow, we are a 1 income family for the next 3 years. Will it be easy? No. But, my retirement savings contributions will not change, because THAT comes first. Even if it means selling the house and buy something cheaper.
I understand your point of view, I just don't agree with it. But, it is YOUR decision to stay at FedEx, not FedEx's, not MrFedEx's, not Dano and not mine.
2 questions for you: What would you say/do to the government if they did away with SS? What if FedEx decided to stop funding a pension fund tomorrow?
Luckily we have a representative government and those representatives know what would happen if they just up and did away with Social Security. And FedEx can't just up and decide to stop funding the pension either. They can only get out of that in bankruptcy, and are nowhere near bankruptcy. I applaud your ability to fully fund your retirement, even if your quality of life suffers. Most FedEx couriers with one income raising kids surely would love to get some pointers on the best way to accomplish that. Probably most with two incomes too. But it's not about me, or even FedEx. It's about the mindset across the board that companies not only don't want to pay enough to make a decent living, they want to end Social Security too because they don't want to pay the matching taxes. If an employer wants to get wealthy, and it's safe to say most do, and needs employees to get him there, the least he can do is assist their retirement through Social Security, if nothing else. And if an employer does offer any kind of pension to attract employees, he's not doing it out of the kindness of his heart but to be competitive with other employers. With pay being suppressed as much as possible a pension is an extremely important component of retirement, and anyone who discounts it has ulterior motives. I've made my intentions clear here that my $20k a year pension is worth more like $60k where I intend to live(and the quality of life is very acceptable). That's what has allowed me to stay at FedEx with some peace of mind. Otherwise in 2008 when the traditional pension was terminated and the economy tanked I would've been scrambling to find something better, most likely long distance trucking.
UpstateNYUPSer(Ret)
Well-Known Member
One of the few things that Bush II got right was his attempt to privatize SS.
Bush Jr's idea of trashing S.S. was at the unofficial request of Wall Street investment banks who saw the crash coming and wanted the money going into S.S. in order to cushion the blow from the upcoming crash. Not to mention the high management fees they could charge millions of small accounts effectively taking most if not all of the small appreciation those accounts would realize in today's zero interest rate environment. After taking billions in taxpayer funded bailouts, you don't hear anything out of them these days regarding privatizing Social Security. In fact back channel noise seems to say that after emigration reform pension and old age retirement reform will be up next but rest assured it will not involve privatizing Social Security.
MrFedEx
Engorged Member
OK, Mr. Self Responsibility. FDX could easily afford to provide you with a real pension, making your duty a lot easier. Right now, FedEx is NOT paying enough, and they don't have enough employees. This past Friday, 20% of one large local station called-in sick on top of late freight. There is no bug going around, so these people just don't care enough to come in and felt they deserved a 3 day weekend. Most stations I know of are perpetually understaffed.
Our PPA is an utter joke, as is the pathetic company match. When ESPP was gutted, there went another retirement investment avenue. As I have said before, many (probably most) Express employees cannot afford to make a decent contribution percentage because they are both underpaid and saddled with excessive benefit costs that make Fred rich.
You do what you want, but FedEx was very irresponsible in taking away the Traditional Plan, which wasn't spectacular. They did it because they could (no union), and they lied completely about the reason(s) for killing the plan.
What a surprise.
The situation over at Ground in some ways mirrors that of Express. There was a complete disregard for the fact that you as the individual contractor had money invested in the venture and by means of the ISP/CSP conversion required from those who remain an even larger investment but the level or respect for that investment is not only no higher but in many respects it's even lower.
MrFedEx
Engorged Member
Yes, that would have been great during the Bush Depression.
!Retired!
Well-Known Member
1. FedEx can stop funding the pension fund anytime they want. Any benefits accrued would be honored.
2. The pension an not be touched by bankruptcy. It's held in a separate account not controlled by FedEx and is insured.
3. Back when the economy tanked, there was talk about privatizing SS. Not because they can do a better job, but because they needed money and they would collect the fees. Once the companies got the bailout money, they abandoned that idea.
So let's see if I have this straight. FedEx doesn't have to offer a pension. But, since they do and it doesn't pay what YOU want to pay, you complain and say it sucks. I got that right?
Also, that large station that had 20% of the couriers called in sick that 'felt they deserved a 3 day weekend'. I'll bet operations still went off and packages still got delivered.
Cactus
Just telling it like it is
I wouldn't bet on it. There's probably plenty of Friday dex 01's sitting under he belt waiting for Monday morning.
The sum of all fears with the exception of The Jackal who just doesn't get it is the growing realization among express grunts that the pay benefits and pension are falling way behind UPS and the USPS and the gap is likely to grow wider and the long held covenant between Express workers and the company whereby if you solemnly dedicated your life to the company it would in the end take care of you and your family has been right from the outset is just another lie and many express grunts are too late in life to do anything about it except to use their experience to make younger grunts understand that nothing that company does or says can be deemed trustworthy or believable.
MrFedEx
Engorged Member
Umm...I think you're a bit misguided. Glad you're so happy with our retirement setup though. The station with 20 percent sick had a boatload of DEX 01s and a lot of outbound that didn't make the plane, including a lot of SDR, so things didn't go well.
I hope they all call in today too. Maybe some of them just quit.
Let me clarify. FedEx can terminate the pension plan anytime they want but they still have to meet their legal funding obligations for accrued benefits and they are obligated to notify annually all participants of the funding set aside to meet their legally binding obligations. You said they can walk away anytime they want but not so, they can only stop the pension benefit from accruing further. I never said the pension can be touched by bankruptcy. I said the only way they can get out of further funding of the pension is bankruptcy, which then gets taken over by the Pension Guaranty Corp, a Federal Gov't entity. And Bush floated a trial balloon about privatizing SS. It went nowhere because all those elected officials knew what would happen to their careers if they did such.
!Retired!
Well-Known Member
If I was as envious of UPS and USPS benefits and pay, as your post shows you are, why are you still at FedEx?
Who said I was?
MrFedEx
Engorged Member
You don't seem upset about it, so maybe you've just given up and will just continue to grab your ankles and take the pounding. I eventually got a second job and built that to the point where it provides me most of my income and investment funds. It hasn't been easy, and I would have preferred to have just one job.
Without a union, things are never going to improve for us, so perhaps you need to think of something different.
Whenever I hear someone talk about the FedEx Retirement "Plan", I remember the old Chris Farley character from SNL, the "motivational speaker" who lived in his van down by the river.
We need to stop being Fred's pawns.
In other words you are living in a very austere manner in order to assure a secure retirement which in turn means that you are in reality subsidizing the pension plan by committing a disproportionate share of your take home pay to that plan. If working for express means living in squalor in order to be assured a secure retirement then I ask you why do YOU continue to work for them?
Yep. And of course the Dems latched onto his efforts and managed to scare people into opposing it.
As I understand it, he didn't want to completely privatize it. He wanted people to have a choice: to invest the money taken out for SS or keep things as they were by continuing the contribute to the SS fund. One advantage of the investment option is that the Gov't would have a harder time throwing roadblocks in your way when you want to tap into what's rightfully yours. As it is, the Gov't treats SS a lot like welfare. If you try to tap into it early, you better be poor, (make less than $16,000 a year) or you have to put up with the Gov's Rube Goldbergian distribution system, which is designed to put people off in the hopes they'll kick the bucket before collecting a red cent of what they were forced to contribute to all their working lives. Nice, eh?
Last edited:
Brought on by the Chairman of the Banking Committee, Democrat Barney Frank (aka "The Banking Queen").
slowdriver
Well-Known Member
Alan greenspan had the regulatory authority to stop it, but chose not to... Republican or Democrat, they were all in it together to enrich their banker buddies..
