Retired ironworkers could face pension cuts next month

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Retired ironworkers could face pension cuts next month

By Jonnelle Marte

[e-mail]
@jonnelle

January 4

Larry Burruel is starting the new year with a grim reality: His monthly pension check could be cut in half at the end of the month.

Burruel, 68, is among the hundreds of retired ironworkers who received the tough news a few weeks before the holidays. The cuts proposed by his pension plan, a small Cleveland-based fund with about 2,000 members, were approved by the Treasury Department on Dec. 16. It is the first time the agency has given the green light for a private pension plan to cut benefits for its members.

The proposal, which will reduce benefits by 20 percent on average, must now be voted on by the retirees and workers in the Iron Workers Local 17 Pension fund. If approved, retirees could see smaller pension payments as soon as Feb. 1.

The cuts were proposed under a 2014 law that for the first time made it possible for struggling pension plans to cut benefits if it would help improve the solvency of the fund. The ironworkers make up a sliver of the roughly 1 million workers and retirees in financially troubled plans that are on pace to run out of money within the next two decades, according to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which insures private pensions.

{Shortfalls grow for the insurance fund protecting millions of pensions}

[dixiegrrrrl]

1. He would be also getting Soc. Sec. I assume.

For years now the financial "experts" have been lecturing future retirees about not counting on Soc. Sec. as sole retirement income, to make sure to pay into other pension plans, from work, and /or 401-k.

and what happened? Just as the 41-k was nearing eligibility for withdrawals, 2008 hit and wiped out thousands of the funds that had that money in them.
and now...actually for some years, beginning in 2008, city, municipal pensions have been declaring they cannot live up to the hype they promised back in the day of actually providing the damn pension.

and...large companies with good pensions were bought out to vulture funds who fired all the workers and grabbed the lucrative pension fund.

I am seriously surprised there are not more people going postal about being thrown into poverty through no fault of their own.