Quote:
Originally Posted by Lafourche1
Just curious. Are you stipulating that the folks who had worked their 25-40 years for General Motors, paid their dues and now have retired, should have had their pensions either cut or taken entirely from them? These people worked most if not all of their adult lives for these pensions. They have earned them. It is part of the bargain that the company made with their employees. To even suggest that this is something that should be taken from someone is not only cruel and heartless, it is theft, plain and simple.
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That wouldn't be an ideal situation, but it's more ideal than tanking an employer (with severe effects on current employees, immediate and in terms of their own eventual retirement) all for the sake of a finite extension of benefits to employees whose contributions to that employer have all been in the past. Worse still in terms of "theft" is having pension benefits including those of many from the auto industry be insured by the government - meaning the increasingly non-union American taxpayer foots the bill if an employer goes under and can't pay all its outstanding pension obligations (regardless of who is at fault - bad management from executives, shoddy work by union labor, market forces beyond the control of either, or some combination of all the above) - stealing from his ability to pay for his own retirement.
Long term, defined benefits pensions are a flat out bad idea for everyone involved, except a lucky few who enjoy a long & stable career followed by a decent retirement, a situation which is definitely not a guarantee, and pensions depend on an expectation of a certain amount of long term growth to make any kind of sense. We in America were spoiled to have a couple consecutive postwar generations enjoy that luck and growth, to the point that now unionized people expect it to continue - even a decade after the 2008 recession proved how foolish that was.
The current transition from defined benefit pensions to defined contribution plans like a 401(k) is smart because it is more realistic long term than a pension. A retiree's 401(k) may lose a lot of value or time as markets fluctuate, but with a mix of low risk/low reward and high risk/high reward investments, it should take a real and extended general market catastrophe to really get that retiree in trouble, the sort that even a pensioner would feel. Unfortunately a lot of unions push back hard against that transition in favor of the phony "guaranteed" traditional pension - but it's encouraging that not all do. I was very surprised a few years ago when the UAW at the aerospace company I work for approved a plan to put future retirement contributions into the 401(k) fund I and other nonunion employees have contributed to for years, maintaining pension benefits accumulated by union members employed before that point.