Saturday, August 20, 2011

A Penchant For Dissing Pensions

There was a time when employers were loyal to their employees just like employees were loyal to their employers.  During those times, employers wanted to make sure that their employees were taken care of after they retired from their employment.  And by doing so, employers would tell their employees that in order to help make sure their employees were taken care of in their retirement years, they would need those workers to accept a bit less in wages in order to be able to fund the pension plan.  Some referred to this method as deferred compensation.

Over the years, some employers noticed that there was a large amount of money sitting in those pension funds, and wanted to use them of other purposes, and in some instances used that money and lost it all.  When the employees went after the employers for the pension money the employers "lost", the courts decided that those funds were not the employees funds until after they retired, and although it was a contractual agreement, the employer had the right to invest the pensions as they saw fit.  Soon afterwards, the arrival of the 401k came along.  Allowing Wall St. to have access to people's supposed retirement funds to do as they wished, and as we saw these past few years, all with no apparent recourse should those funds be pilfered or lost in the market to reckless actions by those on Wall St.

Now move to 2011.  Many states are realizing how much money they have in state employee pension plans, and want to have access to those funds to allow some on Wall St. to gamble with that money.  This is just wrong.  But what people don't understand is that unions would negotiate for higher wages, and at times, when they weren't able to get decent wage increases, they would accept what the company would deem as deferred compensation, which was a means of increasing the monies put towards the pension fund.  So, rather than employees receiving a 3% increase, you might see a 2% increase along with a 50 cent increase in the cost per years of service in the pension.  I was involved in a few contracts where we didn't even get raises, but were able to at least negotiate for increases in our pensions, knowing that it was deferred compensation that would pay off in the future.  Of course, with the latest happenings, and the recent hate mongering towards  unions, we are seeing how some are losing site of, or just plain lying about what pensions really are, and how they are part of a deferred compensation.

And now, worst of all, we have the Pentagon looking at ways to cut costs, and one of the areas they are looking is at the military pension fund.  A fund that has been in place for over 100 years.  There are private industries that know that's a lot of money that they would love to have access to in order to further their wealth, and they will stop at nothing to get their hands on that money, like they did the money of other government employees.  The problem is, when the Pentagon starts talking about cutting costs, the very first place they should be cutting costs is in their contracts with private industries, not the men and women who have sacrificed years of their lives and their rights to give protection to this country and other countries as well.  We have private contractors like Dyncorp, Haliburton, and Blackwater making billions of dollars off of our government with open ended contracts that doesn't put any limits on what they charge our government for their services.  We have contractors who are still charging outragious amounts for items you and I can go to the local hardware store and purchase for a single digit percentage of what the government is charged.

I am not a veteran, but I am an American, and I'm saying, when you start going after one of the major benefits our soldiers have, that's when the line get's crossed.  Enough is enough.  Veteran's, now is the time for you to be vocal.  For you to speak up and ask those of us who are true patriots to stand with you in this fight, and tell the Pentagon officials to shove their reports about your pensions as far up their asses as they can, and then light the damn paper on fire.  Tell them to stop hiring all these private militia forces and start treating and paying our soldiers like they deserve.