Posted on 10/19/2015 4:10:51 PM PDT by afraidfortherepublic
No wonder Tom Minerath is angry.
Sixty-eight years old and retired since 2007, the Town of Merton man is about to have about $20,000 taken away from his annual pension — money he earned, money that was promised him, money guaranteed in contracts negotiated by one of the country's strongest labor unions.
"I'm going to make it through this, but it's just not right," he said. "It's just not right."
Which probably sums up the feelings of more than 270,000 people, including thousands in Wisconsin, who have been told by the financially troubled Central States Pension Fund that their pension payments must be cut, in some cases by 50% or more.
It's a breaking wave in a financial tsunami created in significant part by a change in government policy more than three decades ago that set in motion overwhelming economic forces.
But where the federal government stepped in to prop up giant investment banks after the 2008 crash — a financial debacle the banks helped cause — no bailout is in sight for Minerath and other retired Teamsters truckers. Barring a huge change in congressional sentiment, they'll have to do the bailing themselves.
"It's going to take our living wage, comfortable living wage, and make it non-livable," said retired driver Thomas Botic, 69, of Pewaukee, who recently got notice that his $2,800-a-month pension would be sliced to $1,400. "And at (almost) 70 years old, I don't feel like going out and finding a new job.
"It doesn't sit well with me, that's for sure."
Many of the deepest cuts are being dealt to retirees who worked 30 years and earned relatively large pensions — on the order of $35,000 annually or more — that have let them retire comfortably, but not lavishly.
(Excerpt) Read more at jsonline.com ...
>>I am not a union fan, but the union leader/thugs/felons promised the money. If they cannot deliver, they should be dealt with by the law.<<
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Dang, you are funny!
They were running a ponzi scheme and also siphoning off investment dollars for democrat campaign contributions.
Too bad Joe Eighteen wheeler is getting screwed but is anyone really surprised.
Only a matter of time until bloated government pensions start to default.
And GM and Chrysler, again.
ping
Looks like Obama’s 0 percent interest is kicking most folks in the ass. Let the teamsters call it where they see it.
I don’t really care.
Here’s my solution for replacing pensions. Have a large employer match or fund a portable retirement fund for each employee. Fund it out of the current years budget. Upon retirement or leaving employment the employee can take the fund with them much like an IRA or 401-k. Dont fund future pensions of retired employees. Just give generous contributions to employees budgeted each year and its theirs to take when retired.
I do, you work your entire life based on a contractual agreement between you and your employer that you will receive "x" dollars per year once you retire and now they're going to cut it...
That's no different from me agreeing to hire you at $5,000 per month then at the end of the month telling you that I can only afford to pay you $2,000........
I'm receiving a promised pension from my previous employer as well as social security and I planned my retirement years based on those promises to pay.
Should my prior employer reduce or terminate my pension, ( which is a good possibility since they are filing bankruptcy) I am going to be screwed!!@!
The Teamsters knew that this fund was mob fodder all during the 65 to 85 era. It was where the mob got the Vegas investment money with Teamster management assistance and approval. Their leadership invested money from the pension fund in this manner and as members they let them continue with the crooked operations.
I was uninvolved in the Teamsters and I knew it. Now they want to cry that the fund wasn't protected by taxpayers.
Well then, my fiance and I are sunk. I had head injury ten years ago. Started working again recently. both 47 and 48 respectively.
200k in 401k. combined SS will be about 3500.
dont own.
No kids because i was an idiot and wanted to wait will we were secure. stupid modern thinking.
i dont want any assistance and it’s my bed. i’ll sleep in it.
we are NOT all in this together. Like i’ve said before, that’s communism.
America was built on independence. Yes, it can sound cruel at times, but the alternative is a 19 trillion deficit or communism, or both.
slay the slasher if that will garner satisfaction for being duped by union scum
ping
If it was a public employee union there would be no problem; they just force taxpayers to pay up.
.......must be a teacher.......
Anytime you depend on anything outside yourself it weakens your very nature.
I wonder if their pension fund stopped investing in tobacco stocks, oil, and other proven winners and instead bought up lots of “emerging” green energy companies.
The plan’s troubles, which have been building for years if not decades, were the key impetus for a fundamental change last year in federal rules governing pensions.
Formerly, plans could not reduce benefits once they were earned. As long as a plan had money, it had to pay the pension promised.
But with Central States careening toward insolvency, Congress last December passed legislation — hastily and secretly, critics say — that rewrote the rulebook.
The new law applies to “multi-employer” pension plans — which, unlike the more common single-employer plans, cover more than one company’s workers under contracts with unions.
Prevalent in trucking and some other industries, such plans cover about 10 million people in the U.S.
Central States, based in suburban Chicago and covering a large swath of the Midwest and South, is one of the biggest multi-employer plans, with more than 400,000 working and retired participants.
The thinking behind the Multiemployer Pension Reform Act of 2014 is that if deeply troubled plans such as Central States can’t reduce payments to their pension recipients, the plans will go broke, leaving pensioners with nothing.
Hidden in a spending bill
Passed as part of a $1.1 trillion spending bill, the densely written, 161-page act went unread by many in Congress, Bob Amsden said.
The retired teamsters should sue the teamsters union for negotiating in bad faith, failing to ensure their pensions were managed correctly, representing the membership in bad faith, and mismanaging funds. The retirees shouldn’t be turning to the taxpayers for a handout, the taxpayers never promised them a pension.
The other half of the article details all the indy trucking that came about as a result of deregulation. So all these unions lost members who went elsewhere. All that evil deregulation caused unnecessary job growth and economic expansion, dontcha know?
Could it be that somewhere, under a parking lot, Jimmy Hoffa is either laughing or crying?
During the 1970’s, Hoffa was entertaining an idea of merging the Teamsters with the Communist Party/KGB controlled ILWU (International Longshoremen’s Workers Union) run by Soviet operative Harry Bridges.
I think it was Nixon who told Hoffa that he would break the Teamsters if that happened because Bridges wanted to strangle Hawaii by having his longshoremen go on strike, thus starving that state into submission to his union.
It was a replay of what the Communist Party/Soviet Union tried to do in Hawaii in the mid-late 1940’s (as well as to takeover the emerging Democrat Party (Martin Hall was the top CPUSA leader in the Democrat Party back then, and called the “unofficial mayor of Honolulu”).
Remember Obama’s friend, CP propagandist Frank Marshall Davis was sent down to Hawaii to help the Party and its fronts/political movement via the “Honolulu Record” newspaper. He was sent by Harry Bridges and Paul Robeson, both Soviet operatives and secret members of the CPUSA.
As for Hoffa and the Mafia, from my days on an Organized Crime Task Force in the mid-1990’s, Hoffa’s stepson was named as being mobbed up out of Chicago. I think his nickname was “Chuckie”.
If the Teamsters had cleaned up their act many decades ago, and created a realistic pension plan, what the retirees of today are suffering might now have happened.
I knew some Teamsters, and many were nice guy. Many just didn’t like the fact that I was on a picket line, blocking them from unloading at the old Best Products in Va. and Md.
Our wages were for shit and I’m proud that I walked a picket line for three months in two states.
Best Products eventually went out of business. Poor leadership by people who should have known better.
PS: We got a raise and better working conditions (safety was a major issue) but I never returned to that store.
Just reminiscing, but I think I’m one of a handful of present conservatives who ever walked a picket line. Even had my 5 month old son with me (he slept on the blanket on the sidewalk), for a couple days.
The construction industry unions invited many employer groups full involvement in trustee management four decades ago to avoid this mess of misuse.
The Teamsters were not so open.
I sat on some pension fund boards and we all knew how hard it was to make sure that payments were not over committed.
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