Help Our UAL Friends

Orval Fairbairn wrote:
A neighbor, who is UAL (ret) asked me to circulate this one.

They make some pretty good points, as the UAL people currently stand to
get reamed pretty badly.


They do? Not half as badly as a lot of much poorer people got reamed on
the Gulf Coast earlier this month.

I'll bet a good survey would show that these guys by and large are in
the upper 10-15% of net worth between real estate, investments, and the
like. Are you going to see retired UAL pilots selling their houses on
golf courses? No doubt. Are you going to see retired UAL pilots in soup
kitchens? Pretty unlikely on a $50k/year pension.

As far as I'm concerned, that's where my responsibility ends. I'm 29
and can make a very good income and would still struggle to raise a
family and put a few bucks in the bank so I have something to fall back
on when I don't collect the pension I never had and Social Security
raises the retirement age to one day short of my life expectancy. Oh,
and now we're going to buy you all prescription drugs, too. Wunderbar!
When do I get my handout?

Let's remember that the majority of those who are losing in the
UAL pension debacle are NOT the senior pilots. They are the
mechanics, the flight attendants (who NEVER joined into the
"employee owned" mantra), the gate people, baggage handlers,
the admin staff (usually not union), and so on.

Blanche wrote:
Let's remember that the majority of those who are losing in the
UAL pension debacle are NOT the senior pilots. They are the
mechanics, the flight attendants (who NEVER joined into the
"employee owned" mantra), the gate people, baggage handlers,
the admin staff (usually not union), and so on.

It's not quite that simple. The PBGC will not guarantee over ~$50k/year
in pension payments, and it's mostly pilots who are getting payments
above that range. There is pain being distributed throughout the
organization, but the mechanics, FAs, etc are losing proportionately a
lot less than the upper-tier pilots.

Also, I read somewhere that around 1/3 of UAL's pension funds were
non-guaranteed funds (meaning UAL opted to not pay to insure them
through PBGC) which is a pretty high percentage. This was not a secret
nor were the under-fundings that had been going on for years. Frankly,
UAL's unions were so uniquely obnoxious that I can't excuse them from
culpability for all this. That place was a roaring party when times
were good but hangovers are a bitch.

-cwk.