Union retirees: Don't cut my pension
Source: CNN
By Melanie Hicken
Aimed at saving some of the country's largest pension funds from the brink, the law will allow multiemployer pension plans that are projected to become insolvent in the next 10 to 20 years to cut the benefits of both current and future retirees.
By allowing the plans to cut benefits now, lawmakers say it will help keep around 150 pension funds from running out of money.
But retirees aren't exactly seeing it that way. Many gave up years of pay increases and contributed thousands of dollars from their salaries each year toward their promised pensions. As a result, many have little savings outside of their pension benefits and Social Security checks and are not sure how they'll make ends meet if the cuts go through.
"It's devastating," said 63-year-old Dave Scheidt, who retired five years ago after more than 30 years loading and unloading trucks. "We never dreamed that our pension wouldn't be there."
Related: Congress approves plan to allow pension cuts (@ link)
FULL story at link.
Dave Scheidt and his wife Becki worry that their pension benefits will be cut.
Read more: http://money.cnn.com/2014/12/22/retirement/pension-cut/
= new reply since forum marked as read
Go back and reread what I posted about CWA multi-employer plans. It refutes what you seem to think about ALL union multi plans are run by the Mafia!
Dead horse warning!
When unions were organized in the 30s right wing attacks were far more fierce than now. Ten steelworkers were shot to death in the field just outside the Republic steel mill in Chicago where I used to work at. That occurred on Memorial Day, 1937. Other unions had similar attacks. They grew anyway.
The steel industry is not gone but very diminished due to global competition. Auto has had the same problems. They took unions down with them.
Memorial Day Massacre, Chicago, 1937.
The US produces more steel today than it did in 1969 & employs way fewer people, at lower wages. That's deliberate and nothing to do with 'competition'. And the 'competion' is deliberately created, the better for a few people to game the system.
AT LINK!
http://prospect.org/article/40-year-slump
The largest strike in American history, in terms of work hours lost, occurred in 1959, when 500,000 steelworkers walked off the job for 116 days to secure increased wages and improved health and pension coverage.
The industrial Midwest never recovered. Between 1979 and 1983, 2.4 million manufacturing jobs vanished. The number of U.S. steelworkers went from 450,000 at the start of the 1980s to 170,000 at decade’s end, even as the wages of those who remained shrank by 17 percent.
Offshoring has had an even broader effect on the jobs that have remained behind. Alan Blinder, the Princeton economist who was vice chairman of the Federal Reserve in the 1990s, has estimated that roughly 25 percent of all American jobs are potentially offshorable, from producing steel to writing software to drafting contracts. This has placed a ceiling on wages in these and myriad other occupations that can be sent overseas.
In many industries, the increase in productivity has exceeded Perry’s estimates. “Thirty years ago, it took ten hours per worker to produce one ton of steel,” said U.S. Steel CEO John Surma in 2011. “Today, it takes two hours.”
In conventional economic theory, those productivity increases should have resulted in sizable pay increases for workers. Where conventional economic theory flounders is its failure to factor in the power of management and stockholders and the weakness of labor. Sociologist Tali Kristal has documented that the share of revenues going to wages and benefits in manufacturing has declined by 14 percent since 1970, while the share going to profits has correspondingly increased. She found similar shifts in transportation, where labor’s share has been reduced by 10 percent, and construction, where it has been cut by 5 percent. What these three sectors have in common is that their rate of unionization has been cut in half during the past four decades. All of which is to say, gains in productivity have been apportioned by the simple arithmetic of power.
Only if the suppression of labor’s power is made part of the equation can the overall decline in good jobs over the past 35 years be explained. Only by considering the waning of worker power can we understand why American corporations, sitting on more than $1.5 trillion in unexpended cash, have used those funds to buy back stock and increase dividends but almost universally failed even to consider raising their workers’ wages.
What has vanished over the past 40 years isn’t just Americans’ rising incomes. It’s their sense of control over their lives. The young college graduates working in jobs requiring no more than a high-school degree, the middle-aged unemployed who have permanently opted out of a labor market that has no place for them, the 45- to 60-year-olds who say they will have to delay their retirement because they have insufficient savings—all these and more are leading lives that have diverged from the aspirations that Americans until recently believed they could fulfill. This May, a Pew poll asked respondents if they thought that today’s children would be better or worse off than their parents. Sixty-two percent said worse off, while 33 percent said better. Studies that document the decline of intergenerational mobility suggest that this newfound pessimism is well grounded.
Generalization? The number of U.S. steelworkers went from 450,000 at the start of the 1980s to 170,000 at decade’s end, even as the wages of those who remained shrank by 17 percent.
I see you don't post links to your friends phone #'s so we can call and talk to their inside knowledge you mention! You don't post links when your bested either. Then when you get called on it, you go in silent mode.
OS
Did you say that about yourself?
My unnamed friends. LOL What I supposed to do? Put their names and phone numbers online so you can harass them? No thanks. I started in the mill in 1974 and was making $3.25 a hour. When I finished in 1988 I was making $55,000 a year with much better benefits. But I guess I was just dreaming about that.
Or any kind of link in support of your off base opinion. Silly you.
No link, no friends, no proof of squat!
You got a link that says different other than your friends still in the business quote?
Click on this at the link and you will see benefits have gone down too
OS
I've got verifiable link info on my side. YOU only seem to have BS and imaginary friends on your side so far.
The the company was sold or went out of business 30 years ago in 1984. If you were 20 when you started working there and worked for 12 years, you would jest be hitting the age to get the benefit you earned while you worked there.
Get the point?
This is a misapprehension. There are no 'tables,' and lifespan trends were laid out well ahead of time and were quite accurate.
In every developed country, the inflation adjusted GDP PER CAPITA has increased dramatically since the last century, yet in these times people everywhere are being told there's "no money" to support infrastructure, services, and even a minimal decent life for human beings.
Why in the fuck do you think that is?
Hint: it has nothing to do with people living minimally longer (which they don't really anyway -- it's partly illusory and has to do more with reduced deaths in childhood. Look at famous people from history; they mostly lived fairly long lives.)
having to put funds in every year. Their retires may be the only safe ones. Many here think it is crazy.
Last edited Mon Dec 22, 2014, 12:01 PM - Edit history (1)
This is what happens when people that vote against there best interests get a party in power (REPUBLICANS and DINO'S) that are beholden to the outright corruption from Wall Street and the corporation from the firms filing a secret deal rider(s) into a must pass spending bill to screw the retirees.
Then when these hedge funds and others like the automobile, airlines, mines, file a 10K prospectus, they tell all of the retirees that the pension fund "was fully funded" knowing that it was a lie.
They were taking the pension fund and using it for a operating slush fund, and then when they file for Bankruptcy, they shift the cost to the PBGC.
They then tell the PBGC, they will help fund the program and then turn right around and have this government agency falling further and further behind (42 Billion) in the lack of funding from the non bankrupt and the bankrupted firms.
This is outrageous every congressman and women and senators that voted with and for this last crime laden omnibus spending bill should be sued and thrown out of office.
This is the first salvo, just think what's in store for SOCIAL SECIRITY, so for all of you that did not vote in this last election you are not entitled to whine, and for all you that voted against your own self interest have kept a republican in office you have no business to whine.
...
Lee said in an interview. “Twenty years later, they’re still asking me that.”
“No black person ever, in 20 years, no person of color has ever asked me why.”
...
I don't think the whining is coming from them. It appears to be from someplace higher...
here.
There have been quite a few congressmen and women and senators that have been preaching to the choir to what the corruption is playing out before I eyes, whenever they get the chance.
They and a lot of us have been warning that these last minute budget deals are what is taking this country down the path to fourth state status ranking and the gerrymandering and the out right corruption on the floor of the house is unbelievable, prime example (Boehner giving out bribe checks from the tobacco industry to get a vote). Most people would have gone to jail on the bribe charges if this was taped but not these hypocrites getting the checks, but he keeps getting re-elected by the greedy and political corruption in the state of Ohio. 
WE must also remember that we have a failed media for not reporting this pension and other issues on the floor, like the Postal System being privatized for out right greed, no explanation of history of what is happening and how it happened under the Delay / Hassert corrupt Congress , but just that its not working and that all the postal system does to make money is junk mail, that is a lie.
We get sound bites of more sensational journalism to the beholden commercial interests, we get news that its is going to cost 30 million to sponsor a bowl game name. We get news that a pro football coach is thinking of going to Michigan and that completely failed state and give him 8 million a year. Were they have a de-facto dictator governor attacking the public pension funds and then using tax payer money to build another football and hockey stadium, and those twits in Michigan keep voting against there own self interests, but blaming others.
There is a connection, and if and when the voter finally realizes that what is happening and its is happening to them they start to sing a different tune, but by then its to late.
The dumbing down began in Kanawha West Virginia, when this group attacked public education and books, then we see the transformation of the Republican party being bought and sold by ALEC in the 1970's continuing today and a supposed news organization spewing tin foil gibber jabber of hate and fear. 
I am going to bet one dollar that before the end of the year transpires and another budget bill comes up late next year and its is a must pass bill, SOCIAL SECURITY will be on the proverbial front line that's how confident I am that a REPUBLICAN and a DINO are going to sell and privatize this program, because they will say the fund is running out, no its not , its having issues because someone making over 117,000 dollars and one cent does not have to pay anymore into the system based on there earned income.
corporations to honor their word, ever. It was quite simply, a promise between two parties who were supposed to enter negotiations in good faith. One party promised a defined pension in exchange for a promise from the other side to work hard and loyally.
But of course, logic is not something Americans are good at, so most will simply parrot right-wing talking points they get on cable news, logic be damned. 
homes and cars and trucks" Well then they're waaaay too well off. Cut away!!! 
http://www.aflcio.org/Issues/Retirement-Security
Fewer employers today provide defined-benefit pensions for their workers—and among those that do, many are offering “defined-contribution” (like 401[k]s) rather than traditional “defined-benefit” pension plans.
That’s why Social Security insurance is essential for millions of retirees. Nearly two-thirds of retirees count on Social Security for half or more of their retirement income and for more than three in 10, Social Security is 90 percent or more of their income. It is a safety net that keeps retirees out of poverty.
It’s also important to figure out what you will need to retire. Talking a look at how much Social Security will provide, whether you have another form of pension and how much you spend are all components in determining when you can retire.
For decades, workers achieved retirement security because their retirement income flowed from a combination of employer-provided pensions, Social Security and personal savings. But the recession has exposed the severe deficiencies in our retirement system. We need to develop a new way to provide workers with lifetime retirement security beyond Social Security.
