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More than 120 multiemployer pension funds—plans that cover workers who regularly work for different employers, largely in trucking, mining, construction, and entertainment—are considered in danger of insolvency. They cover about 1.3 million workers.
Congress must decide whether to rescue these funds with low-cost loans, force them to cut benefit payments or let the funds go bankrupt and wipe out retirees’ entire pensions.
The way major U.S. companies provide for retiring workers has been shifting for about three decades, with more dropping traditional pensions every year. The first full generation of workers to retire since this turn offers a sobering preview of a labor force more and more dependent on their own savings for retirement.
Rather than making the government a model employer, the labor proposals would unite Uncle Sam with employee-regressive business practices designed to maximize profits. But Sam is in the business of service, not propelling profits.
As recently as 2015, Donald Trump was still collecting a $168,000
pension — and maybe more — from the Screen Actors Guild
for playing himself in The Apprentice. Now that Trump is about to be president, the most
important question is: What is Trump's plan to save the
system that is designed to protect millions of union pensions like his own?
And there’s also CEO David Cote of Honeywell―a company that has locked out its workers from its factories in Green Island, NY and South Bend Indiana for seven months for rejecting a contract that eliminated workers’ pensions―who receives a monthly retirement check from the company for $908,712.
100 corporate CEOs possess company retirement funds totaling $4.7 billion - an amount equivalent to the entire retirement savings of 41 percent of U.S. families. Things were not always like this. From 1946 to 1980, a combination of union action and government policy led to the expansion of pension benefits for American workers. Now, Donald Trump's pick to direct the Office of Management and Budget says: We have to end Medicare as we know it.
Hiring freezes, an end to automatic raises, a green light to fire poor performers, a ban on union business on the government’s dime and less generous pensions — these are the contours of the blueprint emerging under Republican control of Washington in January.
these are the contours of the blueprint emerging under Republican control of Washington in January.
The major issues are health coverage, pensions and work rules.
Pensions rankle TWU members because theirs don't increase if a worker makes more than $50,000 a year, meaning a union member will receive no more than $30,000 a year in pension payments after retirement even if they earned more than $50,000 when they retired. By contrast, managers with Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority] have no pension caps.
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