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#31
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"gatt" wrote in message ... If they're smart, they'll leave. The company has already shown what its word is worth. Would you work for someone that broke promises to pay you? My dad worked there for 24 years. They laid him off before he could retire, but he was promised his pension when he reached retirement age. Too late for to "leave." Are you saying my father isn't "smart"? Are you saying that company loyalty and hard work isn't smart? -c Well the infomation that UAL was not funding the pension obligation was/is readily availible in Uniteds SEC filings. Personally if I was depending on someone/something to send me money for decades, I would verify that the money was there. The reality is that this might be too much to expect from individual employees, but there is no excuse for the unions not demanding that the pension plans be funded. Mike MU-2 |
#32
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"John Galban" wrote in message oups.com... gatt wrote: Are you saying my father isn't "smart"? Are you saying that company loyalty and hard work isn't smart? I'm really sorry to hear about your father's financial predicament, but to answer your question, hard work is very smart, company loyalty is an anachronism from a bygone era. It hasn't been a relevant concept for decades. Pledging your future to a faceless corporation is great for the corporation, but as your father found out, it's a one-way street. Tactics like getting rid of an employee on the eve of retirement (to save a few bucks) are fairly commonplace. On top of that, banking your retirement on the fact that a corporation will not only be in business, but be profitable enough to support all of the former employees is quite a gamble. Even large corporations fold on a fairly regular basis. I've only been in the workforce for about 26 yrs and have never understood pensions. It requires a huge leap of faith in a corporation. I equate it to keeping all of your retirement savings in one stock. Not a financially sound move by any measure. John Galban=====N4BQ (PA28-180) It isn't supposed to require either a leap of faith or the company remaining in business. The Company is suppose to deposit money to fund the pension plan which is a trust with an independent board. The funds are professionally managed and, barring catastrophe, there should be enough to pay the promised benefits. Mike MU-2 |
#33
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Robert Reich's big question: Do facts still matter? By Peter Schrag -- Bee Columnist Published 2:15 am PDT Wednesday, May 11, 2005 Former Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich, now teaching public policy at Berkeley, has been going around asking a portentous question: As the wage and wealth gaps between the rich and poor grow to unprecedented proportions in America, will we snap back or snap apart? Snapping back is what the nation has always done in the past. After the depredations of the Gilded Age, the sweatshops, the 14-hour days even for children, the Populists and then the Progressives succeeded in enacting antitrust and wage and hour laws, interstate commerce regulation, the progressive income tax, pure food and drug laws and a long list of others. Together, Reich said, those reforms brought things back to tolerable levels. Ditto during the Depression, with laws recognizing the right of labor to organize and strike; enactment of Social Security, banking and securities regulations; and establishment of hundreds of public works projects to put people back to work - roads, bridges, schools, water and power systems. But Reich, a former Rhodes Scholar, also warns about another scenario. "If we don't snap back," he said, "we snap apart into different societies" that have little contact with one another, and where the poor lose the classic American expectation that with enough effort they can make it into the middle class. That snapping apart fuels the politics of resentment and makes the nation susceptible to all sorts of demagoguery - about race and religion, about immigrants, about gays, about elites. As he talked about it recently at the Public Policy Institute of California, it was hard not to believe it was already happening. "Are we living in a madhouse?" Reich asked. And then another question: Do facts still matter? Every day brings more material to underline the question: yet another round of attempts, at a time when the nation is already falling behind China, India and Korea in science education, to eviscerate Darwinian evolution. Teachers all over the country are afraid to fully discuss it. And as we all know, there's the ongoing falsification by one government agency after another of data on everything from the WMDs Iraq didn't have to the cost of the Medicare drug bill to the effects of global warming. Instead, we have the facile morphing of "values" with sectarian beliefs. The country is beset with urgent issues from the multitrillion-dollar federal debt to a health care system that's as unfair and expensive as it's wasteful and often corrupt, to an education system that now runs a poor second or third to those of the nation's economic competitors. We are stuck in a "war" from which there seems to be no exit in a region where our misbegotten policies grow terrorists faster than we can kill them. But instead of facing and debating those issues, we're preoccupied with our religious wars - diversionary issues about who's the godliest among us. We are fixated on steroids in baseball, and on Terri Schiavo and Michael Jackson; and about a federal REAL ID Act bill without any study or test to deny driver's licenses to illegal aliens, which will make things tougher and more expensive for every American at every DMV office, but which probably won't buy us a nickel's worth of additional security. In the past, tough times brought waves of reformist legislative trials in the states - a lot of federal reform legislation was further tested and implemented in the states. But in this state, a generation of efforts to dig ourselves out of our self-inflicted budgetary and governmental mess seems just to have dug the hole deeper and made the system even less comprehensible. It may not be all our fault. Given the global economy and the technological revolutions that enlarge the gaps in income and wealth between those with an advanced education and those without, along with the federal tax, health and foreign policies that, rather than ameliorating the gaps, exacerbate their effects, there may be only so much that even a state such as California can do. That's not to say we couldn't do a lot better - in education, in health care, in housing. And we could certainly stop trying to do worse, as the state has been doing. By themselves, the piecemeal and inconsistent ad hoc lunges of the governor and Legislature don't address any fundamental problems. As the Legislative Analyst's Office has pointed out, the governor's budget reform initiative, the only big thing proposed, can only make the system more rigid and opaque. Even if everything passes that the governor has said he wanted, including his long string of abandoned "oh, nevermind" proposals, it will not change California government and budgeting very much. In another era, we might have helped lead the nation to brighter prospects. We did that with our pioneering environmental and civil rights laws; in creating the greatest public higher education system on Earth; and with our parks and freeways. But does anyone expect anything like that now? Snap back or snap apart. |
#34
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"Gig" == Gig 601XL Builder" wr.giacona@coxDOTnet writes:
Gig Labor is supposed to be the first thing paid. It will be. Oh wait, that's the CEO class salaries and perks that are going to be paid. Well hell, with the Cheney administration what did you expect? |
#35
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"Mike Rapoport" wrote in message
nk.net... Good points all! To add another: Anybody, including United employees could see, in easily obtainable documents, that United was not funding its pension obligations for many, many years. Any United employee who is surprised that they aren't going to get their pension is a fool. The handwriting has been on the wall for years, perhaps decades. Is it every employee's responsibility to monitor pension funding? If not, who's responsibility is it? Just because the information is publicly available, that doesn't mean it's the fault of someone other than the entity responsible for actually funding the pension that it didn't get funded. I can see good reasons for why the "victims" here aren't entirely blameless. But put blame on them just because they weren't performing watch-dog duties seems unreasonable. Pete |
#36
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On Thu, 12 May 2005 20:41:06 GMT, "Jay Honeck"
wrote: Are you saying my father isn't "smart"? Are you saying that company loyalty and hard work isn't smart? No, your father was crapped on. "Company loyalty" is a myth. In my years in the corporate world, I saw no loyalty, either from the company, or from the workers. Which is just one reason I choose to be in business for myself, despite the risks. I've been working for a Fortune 500 company for a little over five years. 2 years ago, the pension benefits in place when I was hired were reduced by 80%. Employees with 15 years service were "grandfathered" and kept the old plan, the rest of us took it in the shorts. At the same time, the company 401k "matching" contribution was cut in half. Good friend of mine was employed by another local Fortune 500 company for 20 1/2 years. He was "downsized", still does the exact same job, works in the same office, but is now employed by the "contract" company hired to replace his department. Of course his salary was reduced drastically, and the benefits are poor. I guess I'm not sure what point Mr. gatt is trying to make. **** like this happens every day. TC |
#37
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"gatt" wrote in message ...
The best way to solve this problem would be to take the CEO, shoot him through the head and hang his corpse from a Wall Street lamp post so that every other executive out there remembers, for example, why the french still celebrate Bastille Day. But we can't do that. Who says you can't? Feel free... I won't tell... |
#38
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Jay Honeck wrote:
Speaking as one of the millions who have never had a pension plan -- and never will -- $45K per year for sitting around the house sounds pretty danged good. You seem to think a pension is some kind of welfare. It's money you arranged to have taken out of your paycheck, to save up for retirement. You know...a "personal account." And the "sitting around" part is supposed to be the retirement they worked for all those years. They were wrong to plan for that? One of us seems to be failing to understand something... |
#39
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Montblack wrote:
6. Morning shift at McDonald's is usually the older English speaking gals. Home Depot pays more and has more interesting work. George Patterson There's plenty of room for all of God's creatures. Right next to the mashed potatoes. |
#40
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Andrew Gideon wrote:
If they're smart, they'll leave. He asked where they would go. Got an answer? The company has already shown what its word is worth. Would you work for someone that broke promises to pay you? I would as long as I couldn't find a job elsewhere. George Patterson There's plenty of room for all of God's creatures. Right next to the mashed potatoes. |
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