The theft of the American pension
In the last decade, the country's biggest companies have raided worker benefits
for profit. An expert explains how
By Thomas Rogers
*
America is in the midst of a retirement crisis. Over the last
decade, we've witnessed the wholesale gutting of pension and retiree
healthcare in this country. Hundreds of companies have slashed and
burned their way through their employees' benefits, leaving former
workers either on Social Security or destitute -- and taxpayers with a
huge burden that, as the baby boomer generation edges towards
retirement, is likely to grow. It's a problem that is already affecting
over a million people -- and the most shocking part is, none of this
needed to happen.
* Continue reading
As Ellen E. Schultz, an investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal,
reveals in her new book, "Retirement Heist," it wasn't the dire economy that
led these companies to plunder their
own employees' earnings, it was greed. Over the last decade, some of the
biggest companies -- including Bank of America, IBM, General Motors, GE and
even the NFL -- found loopholes, abused ambiguous regulations and
used litigation to turn their employees' hard-earned retirement funds
into profits, and in some cases, executive compensation. Schultz's book
offers a relentlessly infuriating look at the mechanisms they used to
get away with it.
We spoke to Schultz over the phone about the companies' deliberate
deceptions -- and what they mean for the future of the country.
How did you first discover this "retirement heist" was happening?
In the late '90s I noticed that many companies, including a lot of
the largest companies in the country, were hiring experts to change
their pension plans. They all claimed they were doing it to make
themselves more modern and better for the mobile workforce, but it
struck me as unlikely that a lot of companies would be doing something
that was apparently costing them money just to make employees happy. I
ultimately figured out that they had found a way to use the accounting
rules to profit from cutting benefits.
Even after reading the book, I'm a little bit confused by how this actually
worked. It was so sneaky.
It took me a long time to find an expert who could explain to me
how these accounting rules worked, but when I finally pieced it
together, it was enormously simple. Think of pensions as a debt. If a
company can reverse a debt, it can record it as income. And that income
is the same as if they got it from selling trucks or whatever it is the
company sells. There were billions in promises to retirees for pensions
and healthcare and death benefits and life insurance, and the companies
figured out that if they cut or eliminated them altogether then they
could get those billions in profit -- and even use them for executive
compensation.
A striking example was Lucent, which inherited about 100,000
retirees when it was spun off from AT&T. From the beginning, Lucent
kept saying, "We are crippled by these retirees," but the truth is, they also
received more than enough actual money from AT&T to pay every
dime of benefits for all the current and future retirees. Bit by bit,
they cannibalized these benefits. They eliminated a death benefit, which is a
very simple thing that says, if you work for us for 25 or 30
years, and you die, your widow will get $50,000 dollars or whatever per
year. Lucent said they couldn't afford that. So they took it away and
saved $400 million that had been set aside physically in the pension
plan for these folks. At the same time, they awarded more than $400
million in bonuses to executives.
I kept on thinking about the market crash of 2008, where
bankers were partly saved from public outrage because the public really
didn't understand how the system worked. I remember thinking, "This is
so complicated that I can't even really get angry about it, because I
don't know how it all breaks down."
The retirees didn't understand this was being done to them. They
just assumed, "Oh well, this company is affected like everyone else by
the economy." They didn't see the role the companies played [in
deceiving their employees]. The federal courts found Cigna documents
that made it clear that the HR executives were discussing how, if the
cutting of employees' benefits was handled right, there wouldn't be an
employee backlash because the people wouldn't understand what was
happening. And it's a pattern that has existed at a number of other
companies.
It may seem odd to you that a person wouldn't know their pension is being cut,
from, for example, $20,000 a year to $15,000 or $10,000. But companies have
various ways of masking it. One way is to pay people a
lump sum when they leave, saying, "Here's a lump sum so you don't need
to wait until you're 65 to get a payment." Almost everyone who was
attracted to that assumed it was the equivalent amount to a pension
because they didn't know about the time value of money and discount
rates and so forth.
Why should people who didn't lose their pensions care about this?
These were not gratuities. This was not something the company
decided they would give you if they felt like it. This was something
that was earned, that was deferred. The pattern after the Second World
War was that as companies were growing quickly, they didn't have a lot
of cash. So the deal was, they gave workers less pay then in exchange
for pay later, and they called it a pension. If you worked for x number
of years, you'd get your pay back. Same thing with healthcare.
So what we see now are millions of people who should not be in a
difficult position financially putting more strain on society, now that
we have to pay for their healthcare and public services. We also care
because a similar, if reverse, pattern of misleading people has taken
place in the public sector: Instead of cutting benefits and hiding the
cuts, in the public sector it was more about awarding more benefits but
hiding the award, because they didn't want people to see how their
obligations are growing.
These days, nobody expects to have a lifelong career at one
company anymore. And so the idea of having a pension from one single
employer seems very alien to a lot of people, especially young people.
Yes, we're moving towards a more mobile workforce where people
don't stay around for life at their jobs. But the companies were taking
aim at the older people who had already been there for a whole career
and were not mobile and didn't want to leave their jobs because they
wanted to keep the money coming in and to pay their bills and build up
their pension. The purpose of changing the plan wasn't to make it better for a
mobile workforce. It was to take away what the nonmobile
workforce had already built up.
Take the retirees of GenCorp. They had been promised their retiree
health coverage in writing, but employers put little clauses into the
plan documents that said, We reserve the right to change the benefits.
The participants didn't know that clause was in there and assumed when
their employers said, "If you take early retirement, we promise we'll
continue your health coverage until you're 65 and you can qualify for
Medicare." On that kind of promise people said, "OK, that sounds pretty
good." After a few years, the companies turned around and said, "You
know what, we can't afford that." When the retirees challenged them in
court, the employers pointed to those little clues in small print deep
in the document. So even when they had these benefits promised to them
in writing, they legally lost. Union employees had physical legal
contracts that had been collectively bargained that said, "We promise
you lifetime coverage." So the employers claimed, "We didn't mean your
lifetime, we meant the life of the contract," and it worked.
Do you think part of the problem is also we have a cultural disdain for the
elderly in this culture?
Yes, they were human resources. They were something that could be
converted into income, and the thought that this might affect them and
their families of course was not the first thing on their list.
I did see a certain reflexive disdain for the plight of some of
these groups. One of the earliest incidents where employers aggressively cut
retiree health benefits by suing the retirees was with the John
Morrell meat-packing plan in Sioux Falls, Iowa. People had this notion,
"Oh, these meatpackers: Who are they to whine they're not getting this
healthcare?" So I went out there and met with these folks. Among them
were very elderly gentlemen who had worked at that plant from the time
they were in high school. They took a time out to go to WWII and then
went back and worked in the plant. They were your basic
salt-of-the-earth folks. They did not have lavish pensions or retiree
healthcare. It was these folks, the backbone of America, who were
affected by this -- not a bunch of greedy old people.
In a few short years, a lot of baby boomers are going to be
looking at their pensions and realizing those aren't there anymore. What kind
of effect do you think that this is going to have on the economy
and future of the country?
What we saw here were two generations that should have been the
best off. They had everything: a pension, retiree healthcare, death
benefits -- and look at what's happened to them. Now compare them to the
current generation where people are working without pensions. If they
have a 401(k), they're lucky if they have anything saved in it --
participation rates are low and people can't afford to put money aside
and if they do, they don't know how to invest it, and if the market goes down
they lose a lot of it. The 401(k)s don't work, and that's the
thing that's supposed to be replacing pensions.
Pensions have been decimated for the people who seem to have the
most secure retirement, and without Social Security a lot of these
people would be destitute. In many cases, that's all they have. I think
we're seeing how critical it is to see some absolute guaranteed benefits in old
age. I could see that if people didn't have that, this country
would start to look a lot more like a third-world country.
How does this change?
There are rules under pension law that are supposed to protect
people. It would be helpful if they were actually enforced. There is a
rule that says that pension assets are to be used solely for the benefit of
retirees or the plan participants. That sounds pretty
straightforward, but as I've noted in the book there are so many
loopholes. In the book I talk about how they withdrew billions from the
plans, sold assets from the plans, and used assets from the plans to pay
executives. All of this is contrary to the intent of pension law, which is that
the assets were there protected supposedly for the benefit of
the people who earned them, and taxpayers subsidized it, meaning that if
employers put money in, it would grow tax-free. That's why a lot of
this is abuse of taxpayers. It's the company taking advantage of what
should have been a tax break to help employees and using it to benefit
shareholders and executives.
This was not a crisis that had to happen. It was manufactured. It wasn't an
accident, and it's profited companies greatly.
* Thomas Rogers is Salon's Deputy Arts Editor. More: Thomas Rogers
http://www.salon.com/news/economics/index.html
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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