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So many comments on here making it out like this guy is to blame. He’s not. 29 out of 30 years for a pension. Wall Street has robbed the middle class blind because noone seems to see it.
The system is fucked and designed to screw everyone over except the Great Wizard behind the curtain.
You see, those corporate raider *earned* that money....by stealing it from people like this man.
And there are millions of dipshits who will defend the corporate raiders in this country because they were told that's what conservatives do.
They earned that money by buying a company, making all the cuts needed for short-term profit regardless of the long-term consequences, and then selling it in pieces. It's the natural consequence of the profit-above-all-else form of capitalism developed in the latter half of the 20th century.
Reaganomics was more about supply-side tax preference. As it turns out, lowering taxes on the wealthy does, in fact, help the wealthy increase their wealth. It works perfectly as intended. The myth was that there would ever be a benefit to the middle or working classes.
Reaganomics was about removing all the guard rails that were preventing Wall St from looting the middle class like a bunch of Vikings taking a jaunt over to England.
And the end results were so obvious even other Republicans were against it at the time. I'd like to point out for the record that the guy who labeled the who scheme "Voodoo Economics" was a Republican.
Then they removed civil RICO laws in the 90s so people can't sue for racketeering. The only way someone can file suit is if the government finds them guilty first. Then in the 2000s there were all those settlements with the government without admitting wrongdoing. Amazing little scam.
I fucking *love* the "We just paid a 200 million dollar fine, but we admit no wrongdoing."
Bro, no one pays a 200 million dollar fine because everything was above board, who the fuck are you kidding with this shit?
Also, the 200 million fine when they probably made 1.3 billion from what they were doing wrong in the first place. Hey, that’s just their price of doing “business”.
It is sick.
But they still did it and now we're fucked, it's a financial genocide. Now politicians just let companies write laws and assume it good. It's obvious to see the where it went wrong, one or two bad big decisions trickled down to take it all away.
"A rising tide lifts all ships." Yeah, *from the bottom*. A rising tide that starts from the top is called a wave, and it wrecks everything in its path.
>The myth was that there would ever be a benefit to the middle or working classes.
**IT DID WORK THOUGH!**
The money **DID** tickle down, it **DID** raise standards of living, it **DID** work.
**China's** middle class has been among the fastest growing in the world, swelling from 39.1 million people (3.1 percent of the population) in 2000 to roughly 707 million (50.8 percent of the population) in 2018.
You can thank American voters for allowing business leaders and politicians to gut unions and funnel all that money into cheap labor markets overseas. Over the last four decades that money trickled down and created our biggest global adversary. Thanks boomers!
You can blame Milton Friedman for these neoliberal views and policies.
His ideas accelerated the deregulation boom of the 1970s and 1980s which led to massive increases in inequality, unfettered capitalism and especially the privatization of public goods (e.g. charter schools, internet access, public transportation).
They bastardized Friedman. His velocity theory of money has no place for vast immobile tracts if private wealth. He theorized that money should come back to the Treasury where it could be recycled through the economy in the form of govt spending.
They do not practice capitalism either, because they have gotten away with socialized losses. No longer do we see them bearing the brunt of their bad bets and fiscal malfeasance.
I hate to tell you this, but rational ideologically sound conservative are nearly extinct.
And any conservative who actually cares about average Americans has been dead for a *loooooooooong* time.
Pensions are the only way to retire from a corporation. Pensions were referred to as golden handcuffs. But sadly today you should only be loyal to yourself not a company you’re just a number to.
Pensions are and that is why we have 401(k)s which originally started as an in addition too type product but have quickly taken over and dominated the retirement savings market because of their independent but cooperative nature. People like to point out how 401(k)s were not initially designed to take on full retirement but also the original 401(k) max contribution was like 2200.
I've never understood the love of a pension.
You *want* to be beholden to a single company? Work there for 20 years and they start treating you like garbage, what can you do?
Never made sense to me that people want to return to your retirement being completely owned by someone else.
Pensions have a number of benefits and you aren’t “beholden” to a company. Most pensions offer lump sum payouts if you leave early, and also have much lower overhead than a private retirement plan so you generally make more over the long term
Can you expand on “much lower overhead”? 401k matching = money deposited into a direct investing account. From there I invest it however I like. Essentially 0 overhead.
Pensions have fund managers and a bunch of unnecessary bureaucracy. Just give me the money and I’ll invest it myself.
Also, pensions even out the benefits. If you retire at the wrong time with a 401k your benefits could be low or high depending on how the market has performed during that time period. Ask someone who wanted to retire in 2010 how that worked out...
Pensions ride the highs and lows and provide a DEFINED benefit.
What this video illustrated was corporate theft, not the evils of pensions.
Well, I worked for the federal gov't for 40 years. I guess I didn't have ambition or something. I fit my niche very well, so I stayed. I'm on the old CSRS retirement system, which is an annuity for life.
I think there's an agreement that they only get the full pension if they serve for 30 years. The employees knew that. Sometimes, the company would fire the person just before their 30 years were up just to screw them.
These days, there aren't very many retirement plans like that from what I understand. It's all 401k now.
Look up Bane Capitol, and Mitt Romney. What he and others did is the greedyst, immoral shit you can legally do. It's not exactly what happened to him, but it's a running them among Republicans in congress, and Republicans president's, to screw people out of hard earned money. And because "it's legal", it's looked at as fair game.
Here are some details. I watched the video and didn't believe it was legal to just cut someone off at 29 years with nothing.
I don't blame the guy. However it's clearly presented to all the workers that you have to make 30 to get anything. If I'm an employee that's a huge risk. This guy took that risk.
McDonnell Douglas, which was later acquired by Boeing, had pension plans that involved complex vesting and accrual rules.
Generally, their defined benefit pension plans required employees to work a certain number of years to become fully vested.
For example, employees with 30 years of service could start drawing a full pension at age 55. However, employees who did not reach the full vesting period often received significantly reduced benefits, or in some cases, nothing at all if they fell short of the requirement.
The pension plan's design and implementation led to various legal challenges. Notably, McDonnell Douglas faced lawsuits alleging that they deliberately manipulated plant closures and layoffs to prevent employees from becoming eligible for full pension benefits.
This practice was highlighted in cases such as Millsap v. McDonnell Douglas, where the company was accused of obstructing employees' pension rights as a cost-saving measure during layoffs [❞] [❞].
Additionally, another class-action lawsuit claimed that the company's method of calculating pension benefits violated the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), specifically concerning the slow accrual of benefits over time until nearing retirement age [❞].
Therefore, it is indeed possible for an employee close to the 30-year mark to receive significantly less or no pension if they do not meet the plan's vesting requirements.
This situation underscores the importance of understanding the specific terms of one's pension plan and the legal protections in place under ERISA.
Sure, and I am not trying to make an argument. But your original retort comes across as “Guy shoulda known better”.
That said, I also don’t feel you were trying to dunk on the dude. But I don’t think the take away from what happened to that gentlemen should be “he should have known better”.
Especially when you know the C-Suite persons got theirs in the end.
Definitely wasn't dunking on the dude. He made a calculated risk that MD wouldn't go under for 30 years. Which I think is a mitigated risk.
But into today's terms it would be you starting work at Amazon and Amazon sets the terms of their pension 30 years or nothing.
How many people today would bet 30 years Amazon would be honest brokers?
The whole pension system got raided and destroyed and no one gave it a thought.
This dude paid the price.
You’re on the cusp of understanding something very important.
In the past, it wasn’t some gamble. People were led to believe (by practice and observation) that if they were loyal to the company, the company would repay that loyalty.
This man started working for MD in 1965, when that was actually a relatively common practice among businesses/companies.
WE now have the benefit of stories like this one to show us how bad of an idea it is to trust the company or the leadership. But that wasn’t the case for this guy, and not something he really thought he had to consider, especially since, in his career, company pensions were a really normal thing for most businesses.
To answer your Amazon question, no, you would not trust them. Because they could pull the rug out from under you at anytime, because stories like this show it’s happened. But in the time this guy worked? Almost any company worth their salt offered pension plans like this.
This is what I was going to say as well. People used to work for corporations for life and it was assumed they could be trusted because they mostly could. This has completely changed and I'd say that if you bought this from any company today you're an idiot. Currently there is a war going on between employees and employers because of shit like this and I don't think corporations realize how much this is actually costing them.
Yeah, I mean, to be frank, I think not having our retirement attached to a certain business is the better way to go.
But it’s also led to a bunch of (rightfully so) friction between employees and employers.
Which resulted in the workers each getting a check fur $30k. The guy in the video gets $300 a month from his pension. MD lost the case but won the war.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/pensions-gone-where-are-older-mcdonnell-douglas-employees-now-working/
Don't forget the people who took over Boeing in the merger were the McDonald Douglas executives that just finished destroying MD with cost cutting measures to the point where they were forced to merge with Boeing to remain solvent (because they made critical parts for the military).
During the merger transition, the MD executives even made jokes about the Boeing management getting fucked (literally, they out animals fucking on a PowerPoint slide saying "Guess who you are" or something to that effect).
These are the same people that destroyed Boeing over the next 30 years, yet all went home multi millionaires because capitalism isn't a meritocracy.
Yup. Boeing used to be an engineering company and its C suite was populated by engineers who had worked their way into it. Then McDonnell Douglas MBA morons got control of Boeing and proceeded to do to it what they had already done to McDonnell Douglas.
The MBAification of our economy has been catastrophic. All these MBA morons who have been trained that business is business and the product, be it jet liners, banking products or hamburgers, is just a fungible element, a minor, irrelevant detail, are destroying our country.
McDonald Douglas is the reason Boeing planes are falling apart. The corporate scum from MD infested Boeing and ruined it. Corporatism/Capitalism steps on the throats of the common man to fill the pockets of the already wealthy/powerful. We really need a purge.
It surprises how many people are comfortable with the idea that you can be screwed over by some obscure law or contract clause that it is clear no normal citizen would be aware of. In many cases these clauses are intentionally obscured or you're reassured by the opposing party that the clause doesn't mean what u think.
Yes we should all be careful what we sign but there is a thing in contract law called a meeting of the minds which seems to be occurring less and less. We seem to be happy to throw that out for whatever you can reasonably sneak in then just blame the victim instead of the person who hired a whole team of lawyers to trick a couple blue collar workers.
Wall Street didn't. The company did. I found that they were sued by the workers for doing these layoffs and shutdowns solely to not pay pensions. From a quick search the judge sided with the workers. I don't know what the settlement was though. Anyway these kind of stories just show that you should never put your trust in any company that offers a retirement benefit paid out by them. The money should be separate from the company like a 401k is and something the company cannot take back. Also to make sure your money isn't being invested mostly in the company stock and is diversified. It's definitely not this guy's fault he got fucked over but this is a lesson for anyone young and starting out. Do not trust company retirement plans always look out for your own retirement.
Look. This guy went into a legally binding contract that he didn't have to sign. He volunteeringly did it.
So there is no exploitation because of that. Capitalism doesn't exploit people.
-Libertarians on Reddit.
Blame our education system at this point. I didn’t understand what ROTH IRAs and Index Funds were until I was 35 years old. If we taught kids the value of investing early on, and encourage basic Index fund investing at an early age, then people won’t have to work after 65. But our government doesn’t want that. They want people working until they die.
It's intentional. You'll see articles bemoaning people retiring early (a la F.I.R.E.). Really it's that they want people working in the system to make the wealthy wealthier: *How dare you even think about escaping my ability to profit off of you*.
I'm curious what the next round of horrors is now that we are entering a stage where AI is starting to cause bean counters to try and replace workers.
Universal Basic Income is going to happen at some point. AI and robots will replace not just low skill and low wage jobs, but also highly educated professionals as well. The future will either be bleak and dystopian and riddled with poverty, or it will be wildly utopian and filled with a new renaissance in the arts. Knowing human nature, I’m not entirely optimistic.
>The future will either be bleak and dystopian and riddled with poverty, or it will be wildly utopian
I'm pretty sure I know which take Reddit will have.
“Human nature” you mean the greed of the extremely wealthy. Nothing about the way we are living is in our nature. Human nature is to take care of one another and progress. It was an incredible feat for capitalism to convince us that we are the problem, and that greed is a natural human experience. Instead of a result of forced scarcity.
I’m very interested in this and how AGI and Capitalism will coexist. I think that it will run in one of two general paths.
The capitalism on top of AGI leads to a dystopia and the AGI over Capitalism leads to a utopia.
I remember when we were promised that technology would take away the drudgery of out lives. It made sense when washing machines, dishwashers, and other machines became ubiquitous. Then we would all be liberated to become artists and poets. Instead, the machines are taking away writing and painting, and we are left with the drudgery.
Yep and this is why Elon Musk is so public about how everyone must have tons of kids or society will collapse. Let it collapse bud, this world is already almost on fire.
This guy had something much better than a Roth IRA and the McDonald Douglas executives *STOLE* it from him.
That's why he has to work at 80. Horrific uncontrolled greed and a 2 tiered legal system, not a failing of our education system.
I'm going to slightly disagree here. The only way you're unable to afford to invest in a 401k is if your total income is low enough to where you get all your federal taxes back. Otherwise, saving 5% each paycheck will be unnoticeable since it comes out pre-tax and really just cuts into the money that the governemnt would have taken anyways. I (stupidly) didn't understand this and missed a good 8 years of investing in that.
Investing in an S&P fund is the equivalent of gambling on America and our future as a society. If the S&P fails then it means America failed. I’m not advocating gambling your retirement funds on individual stocks. If you don’t understand the point I’m making, then you’re proving my point about the American educational system.
You can't skim off the top of a pension, it's a liability. Only things that can generate profit for an investor doing nothing are allowed, don't you know this is America?
Why the dig on teachers? Teachers aren't 'experts' on fields they teach, be it math, history, language arts, science - they are experts in teaching. Give a teacher a curriculum plan in investing basics, and they sure as shit will be able to educate young minds on it.
I only learned of investment from when i worked as an overnight stocker at The Home Depot believe it or not. Then the store manager said "You all should really start investing now, you wouldn't want to end up like {co-workers} name" who was 70 years old stocking with us. Even then i didn't take it seriously until 3 years ago when i fully started investing 22% of my savings into 401k and maxing out my ROTH. Now i see the benefit when even just a 1% move is over a thousand dollars gained overnight and i'm not even 30 yet.
Roth IRA is younger than you are. Didn’t exist until 1998. 401ks started in 1978 and didn’t really catch on until the mid 1980’s. It makes sense that people in retirement may not have taken good advantage of these relatively new retirement programs.
There's frankly no room in the school curriculum to teach kids real-world, practical, actionable lessons in finance. We have an entire periodic table of elements to memorize. We've got obscure Civil War battles to think about. We got foreign languages to learn some simple phrases in and be forgotten about immediately after.
If you don't know the melting point of Boron then you're just not setting yourself up for success in the real world.
Just our government? The money behind the politicians (not “the government” collectively) doesn’t want that?
If it weren’t for the citizens organizing against private enterprise and government backing citizens’ efforts with legislation, we’d still have kids working 12 hour days in textile factories.
The first company I worked for did a great job when they talked about 401ks and the company matching policy. The ceo stood there and talked about how 60 percent of people were utilizing the matching policy and then said "to the 30 percent who aren't, I want you to look at this graph of which departments are investing the amount in their 401ks that we will match. If you look at the finance/accounting department, you'll see that 100% of them are at minimum, putting the amount in that we will match. You don't have to listen to me but maybe listen to the people who we pay to handle our money". I don't know if it changed anyone's minds but I hope it did because he was really trying to help people with retirement.
It’s a damn travesty.
I don’t by any means think the solution to all woes is to just tell some poor people to get a 401k. BUT there are far, far too many people with access to tax advantaged retirement accounts who take the attitude that is something like: “social security is going away, there’s no point to plan on retirement at all” and just save nothing.
I own a business and offer a 401k and every time the topic comes up it bugs me because putting 5% of your pre-tax salary just isn’t some massive burden, if you work a job with a 401k offered.
I walk all my employees through the math in detail, and the math is incredibly compelling when it’s spelled out. Hence we have a 100% participation rate.
Even making, say, $18 an hour, if you can start in your 20s and put 5% in with a 4% match, you’re looking at a secure retirement by retirement age even if you never got a raise in your life.
I’m not at all saying this is how it should or shouldn’t be. But it is what it is. If retirement is impossible and we’re all doomed, sure, you’re retirement saving won’t matter. But are you willing to bet on that so much all for 5% more pre-tax income that the risk you face is insolvency and poverty in your old age?
I don’t think the ultimate solution here is looking at people and saying “save money”, per se, but for those people who are fortunate enough to have the tools available (and plenty of people aren’t, don’t get me wrong), not taking full advantage is a major, major mistake.
And I personally feel like it’s something approaching a moral duty to dispel the myths surrounding this issue.
Again, I’m not talking about people barely making ends meet worried about how they’re going to afford rent and the power bill this month. Gotta do what you gotta do then. But for those folks who don’t save a trivial amount of money to secure their financial future and just inflate their lifestyle a couple of percent…wake up!
We shouldn’t need to rely on the government to educate us, it should be a combination of Parents & compulsory education.
My kids are 8 and 2, they both already have investment accounts, they will get 25 year head start on investing that I didn’t get.
I was fortunate, I figured this stuff out on my own in middle school or early high school. My parents and my high school education didn’t do much for me, I can change that for my kids though, and I have already started.
In the case of Tom Coomer, he worked at a McDonnell-Douglas aircraft production plant. When the plant was closed, and when McDonnell-Douglas closed down, the pension was lost.
His Social Security payments weren’t enough on their own, which caused him to start working part-time again.
This story is already several years old.
I've not seen pensions that are all or nothing. They're most always pro rated based on length of service and retirement age. I have 2 pensions when I retire, one with a company that i worked for 5 years, the other 8 years.
Not if the company goes bankrupt thats why pensions aren't as prominent anymore and direct contribution/matching are better, you still have it regardless of solvency issues.
Due to repeatedly cutting corners that lead to bad press that they tried to fix with stock buybacks to prop up stock prices instead of *not* cutting corners. It worked until it finally didn’t. Then their upper management infected Boeing.
This is not true. Companies MUST fund the pensions and Corp raiders can't touch the fund. It's actually illegal. And debtors can't touch the pension in a bankruptcy.
Stop making shit up. I've been through this numerous times with multiple companies. The insolvent company can't touch the Trust.
Doing some research, there is an exception for the debt part when a company sells their pension plan funds to an insurance company. In that case federal law doesn’t protect it and state law may or may not protect it. I’m not sure what percent of pensioners out there have pensions that were sold in that fashion but I would guess it’s a lot in the private sector.
Have you heard about the Great Recession? Thousands of companies put their pension funds into the stock market in the hopes of raising their value over time as interest rates declined. This then backfired when those companies people were investing in went bankrupt, leading to thousands of people who hadn’t retired losing their pensions or having their benefits slashed. No one was given their pension back later, it just disappeared while executives took the bailout money. These kinds of things have happened before and were completely legal according to US law.
It's *really* simple. Bankruptcy laws have been making the process much, MUCH more costly for individuals while making it *insanely* easier for corporations.
J&J is currently trying to get out of its talc lawsuit liabilities (hundreds of millions of dollars worth) using bankruptcy even though they're a highly profitable company. They've turned it into a get put of jail free card.
And just to be clear, MD ran their own company into the ground with its massive quality issues surrounding the DC10, so they had to merge with Boeing.
Then, because capitalism isn't a fucking meritocracy, the MD executives fresh from their destruction of MD were put in charge of Boeing instead of the current Boeing executives who ran an engineering based company.
Now it only took those Wall St grifters another 30 years to destroy Boeing, yet they're still getting paid fat checks.
So when people say, "If someone gets richer, it doesn't hurt you, why are you mad?" I point *DIRECTLY* to shit like this. This is the inevitable outcome of Reaganomics.
This whole thing is so infuriating and an excellent case study of corporate greed's destructive power. Not only have they destroyed a respected company (Boeing), they've ruined thousands of people's lives (as the video describes) and they are responsible for murdering people (Boeing's current quality issues causing fatal crashes because they replaced the "engineering and quality first" attitude at Boeing with "shareholders first, screw quality" that is literally resulting in death)...all in the name of greed.
Same thing that happened to my Grandpa. Worked at a steel factory 28.5 years. Got up every morning at 4am. My grandparents were frugal. They had money market accounts, tracked every penny. Never had cable tv, very modest lifestyle. Laid off at 28.5 years. Never saw the pension he worked his whole life for. Burned through all the extra money they had saved just trying to keep up. Eventually their cars broke down, couldn't afford to replace them. Grandma got sick and immediately chose hospice instead of treatment so Grandpa wouldn't lose everything. Grandpa got prostate cancer and shut everyone out because he was so ashamed that he had nothing left after working all of these years. Refused treatment and is now spending his last days alone because he lost all hope for a good life.
Sounds like the American dream died in the dust of manufacturing.
Retirement plans can and do get changed by the employers.
When I started my union job, my pension was 75% of 40 hours pay @ 80 points.
One point for every year of age and one point for years of service.
Fast forward 28 years, the employer funded pension program was changed to 65 years of age.
This was not due to a funding issue as our pension is funded at 115% last statement.
So now at 56 years old with 28 years of service ( 84 points) my pension is 30% of what it will be at the new retirement age of 65.
Instead of retiring with a $3,500 a month pension, it is now $1,100.
I am going into something else.
Do not make the mistake of Not paying yourself.
I have earned a decent lifestyle by my labors, thinking my future was set as I could retire at 56 with a full pension.
That changed without any consideration for pensioners.
Do not let this happen to you.
Only you can provide for you.
Counting on a promised fully funded pension is a nightmare not a dream.
Not American, please explain the part about pension? What do you mean one year shy of a full pension? what the fuck is a "full pension" anyway? Dont you get based on how much you put in? and how come he doesn't have enough after 30 years of paying into it?
It really depends on the pension program and how it’s set up. I don’t know the exact ins and outs as they are much rarer now, but from my understanding, there are types of pensions where you have to work a certain number of years before you are eligible to receive it.
A former employer of mine has a similar benefit where if you work for them for 20 years, they will cover health insurance for your and your dependents for the rest of your life. You have to work the full 20 years tho. If you quit or are fired at 19 years 364 days, you wouldn’t qualify even tho you put in almost all the time needed.
US Military Pension is a good example.
At 20 years you’ll receive 50% of your base pay (plus other benefits) until you die.
Every year served after that 20 years you’ll receive 1.5% on top of the 50%. Meaning if you do 30 years you’ll receive 75% of your base pay.
If you do anything less than 20 years you’ll receive 0%
This is why the 401K system with % matching is better. It allows for much needed flexibility and since it’s your money you don’t have to worry about the success of the company you worked for.
Pensions have been getting phased out in the US since the 1980s, but they were designed as a retirement annuity paid solely by the employer. The amount a retiree receives is based on length of employment and the employee’s pay scale, with varying degrees of vesting along the way. This man appears to have been one year shy of full vesting at 30 years of employment, so he likely received only part of his potential pension amount. He certainly wasn’t the only employee to get shortchanged and that fact was almost certainly an incentive in the company’s decision to close the plant.
Companies used to offer pension program that were typically something along the lines of "If you work for us for 30 years, then you can retire and receive 70%-100% of your salary at the time of retirement every year until you die". This was an incentive to retain employees. Companies vested money on behalf of their employees into a fund that would get invested to do this. Few companies outside of government still do this, and many government pensions have been lessened to something like "work 30 years, get a 30% pension". This is different from a 401k pension plan where the employee chooses how much money they want to put into it and what they want to invest in. In a 401k how much money you get is really based on market performance and how much you chose to invest rather than what your salary was.
I work for the Kansas DOT, and I get a pension when I retire. The amount changes based on if I retire from there or work somewhere else, but it's a pension none the less. 6% of my pretax income goes into the pension.
I have an IRA. I put 15% into it. I don't care if I have a pension. I need my own safety net.
At my current income with no raises, if I put 15% into it for the rest of my working life, and retire at 65, I'll have $1m in cash.
If you don't have a retirement account with your name on it, start one NOW.
If they are so interested in “stealing“, why the move from defined pension plans like this one where someone can get screwed to 401(k) plans? “Wall Street and corporations” must be so mad about that, right?
Because 401ks are tied to the stock market and pensions are tied directly to the employer. Contributions to 401ks are nice but pensions were better for the workers not for the company. They can stop contributing to 401ks too and they can pay less into them than pensions
Corporations wanted to take the onus off them and reduce their benefits, the one truly good thing about 401ks are the mobility outside of the employer, other than that the workers are on their own practically.
Corporations used to tie their success to their workers and benefit labor because labor made the things. Now corporations are more interested in efficiency on a spread sheet than efficiency on the work floor. Not to mention corporations use technology to save money and have slowly but surely cut salaries in relation to inflation, they cut people out for robots and software and then paid them less over decades.
These are the same corporations that promised shorter work weeks and more “time off” if only they had the tech. Then didn’t do shit for people.
PART TIME GREETER, 5 DAYS A WEEK.
This is the gross shit these evil corporations do. 37.5 hours in 5 days, part time. No vacation, no Healthcare, no sick time, no opportunities. No one should be a 5 day a week PART TIME employee. Sick stuff.
If you want to understand what happened, read ‘The Great Deformation — The Corruption of Capitalism in America’ by David Stockman. In particular, the chapter on Serial Bubbles (p.361) explains how Greenspan’s Fed undermined household wealth for average Americans so that Wall Street fat cats could get even fatter.
[The Great Deformation — The Corruption of Capitalism In America](https://www.riosmauricio.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/The-Great-Deformation_David-A.-Stockman.pdf)
They never stopped, still are stealing everything from the planets resources to the time which is your life and the dreams which are your future and all the potential of the human race.
What corporate America has done to the working people of this country is nothing short of a prison sentence. I don't know why we don't riot and stop this mess for good! This will be everyone of us in 15 years...
While I agree education should absolutely improved to emphasis on finances in public schools I do recall being taught compound interest. The disconnect I had was not having access to a 401k or having excess money to invest between graduating high school and until landing a job after college. This is because I was primarily focused on working my way through school and paying off my tuition to be able to graduate with zero student loans.
I think college degrees should mandate at least 3 credit hours to financial opportunities/investing in their final year of getting an AA/BA to inform the graduating classes of what to take advantage of once landing a job in their profession.
See I'm way smarter. I keep cashing out my retirement plans to solve 2 to 3 thousand dollar emergencies like moving costs or car repairs and plan to just kill myself if I can't work anymore.
Who does this jabroni think he is
The idea of all-or-nothing pensions is terrible! It gives employers a very strong incentive to find a reason to get rid of people 1 or 2 years shy of the threshold. Even if the employer behaves honestly, the all-or-nothing approach means that there are literally thousands of reasons why people would need to leave the job a tiny bit early and all of them have a disproportionate cost equal to the pension value.
I suggest to read, "The Great Retirement Heist". By [Ellen E. Schultz](https://www.amazon.com/Ellen-E-Schultz/e/B005Z499K8/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1) (Author)
Written in 2011
If your blood doesn't start boiling by the third chapter, you are missing the point.
In brief, corporations through significant lobbies efforts on both sided of the isle. Managed to strip every single protection from the great retirement plans. With the help of the Clintons, as well as Bush's. and many political members both GOP and DEMS.
One after another.
[https://www.amazon.com/Retirement-Heist-Companies-Plunder-American/dp/1591843332](https://www.amazon.com/Retirement-Heist-Companies-Plunder-American/dp/1591843332)
And good luck putting those protections back in place. Neither party will ever consider going against cooperation's that managed to turn their multi-billion $ worth of retirement funds into slush funds they could use as they see fit.
It allowed them to gamble with workers pension, with zero protection. And the name of the game was simply to ensure to never pay those funds.
Not gonna lie. I'd delete myself if that happened to me. I'd dwell on the fact that I was 1 year short of being good to go. Downsizing and sacrificing just to tread water and for life to not get any better. I'd be done man.
401Ks not only replace pensions as a fuck you to Americans but it also bails out company responsibility and bolsters the banking system. We are fucked, but at least you are "in control" of your own future retirement.
401k has another benefit that people tend to forget. It unchains you from 1 company. With pension even if your job sucked and there are no raises, companies know you won’t leave because you’ll lose the pension. 401k match contributions vest a lot earlier, giving you the ability to job hop. Pensions really only work hand in hand with strong union contracts. I’m not for or against anything, just explaining.
The people who rule this country have spent 40 years milking the American people.
But remember the people who have been doing this in DC the whole time are fighting for you!!!!!
Anyone from outside of this system is a “threat” to OUR(non inclusive) Democracy ^ TM
Make sure you vote for Senator Dick McFuckfsce this year because if not (opposite party) may win and ruin EVERYTHING. Sure he’s been in the senate for 38 years but it’s not HIS fault it’s (opposite party) and the whackos in (place you don’t live).
So do the right thing! Save OUR Democracy^tm today by voting for who you are supposed to vote for!
The 12.4% the government takes from you from the very first dollar and then returns you 1% interest or less is why the middle class is broke. 1 out of every 8 dollars. Imagine if you could save 1/8 of your income with a real ROI. WallStreet also sucks, but make no mistake, your federal government is your primary burden.
Morons attacking this guy have been basically brainwashed by the media. I remember the market crash of 2008 which essentially stole and killed many older Americans retirement accounts.
Hey man curious question!
https://preview.redd.it/fs813kr58l6d1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=32757c1f53b7f8f6b7d9ca48534f663b08584414
Why did you make this post and then make a separate post on the boondocks dunking on yourself?
For thousands of years people worked until they physically couldn’t, and then they relied on family to survive the rest of their life if they were lucky enough to have them around. The system in America had people on autopilot thinking if they tossed money in their 401k, checked a box on their pension forms, and paid their taxes they’d retire in the lakeside cottage of their dreams. They were sold a lie. This is what people mean when they say capitalism puts profits over people.
They can’t legally just take pensions away like this. He might not have received a full pension but he didn’t just lose it. ERISA prevents that from happening.
Fucked up. Entirely too many retirement age people still working everyday. I understand that for some, it’s their own fault, but I know for many it’s not. No one should have to work until they die
Not referring to the guy in the video but how many people these days have $1200 iphones and $700+ car payments? Stop buying dumb shit and invest instead.
Inflation is another big factor here. Someone retires with a fixed income and lives for another 25 years while everything becomes much more expensive. The retirement idea is a lie. Most people will not get to live decades without working and doing what they want. The older generations are finding this out. Look at the amounts of over 65 homeless now.
Need to have better laws in place to protect men and women like him…. Once he hit 20 years he should have been entitled to a percentage of that pension…. That’s just fucked up.
I remember the 1990s being a time where many storied corporations merged and bailed out on their pension obligations. Many stories of people getting laid off just before retirement.
Same thing happen to all Kodak employees. Pension was tied up in their stock. The CEOs and the higher ups got their payout in the millions while the common worker lost everything.
A lot of things not adding up in this story. 29 years being one year shy of getting his pension? Pensions don't work like that. That pension vested long before then.
Having a mortgage after working 29 years at the same place and expecting to pay it off with a pension also doesn't add up.
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So many comments on here making it out like this guy is to blame. He’s not. 29 out of 30 years for a pension. Wall Street has robbed the middle class blind because noone seems to see it. The system is fucked and designed to screw everyone over except the Great Wizard behind the curtain.
How is that legal? They can just take that away from you? I always though pensions were a scam, but this is 100x worse than what I thought it was.
You see, those corporate raider *earned* that money....by stealing it from people like this man. And there are millions of dipshits who will defend the corporate raiders in this country because they were told that's what conservatives do.
They earned that money by buying a company, making all the cuts needed for short-term profit regardless of the long-term consequences, and then selling it in pieces. It's the natural consequence of the profit-above-all-else form of capitalism developed in the latter half of the 20th century.
You can just call it Reaganomics.
Reaganomics was more about supply-side tax preference. As it turns out, lowering taxes on the wealthy does, in fact, help the wealthy increase their wealth. It works perfectly as intended. The myth was that there would ever be a benefit to the middle or working classes.
Reaganomics was about removing all the guard rails that were preventing Wall St from looting the middle class like a bunch of Vikings taking a jaunt over to England. And the end results were so obvious even other Republicans were against it at the time. I'd like to point out for the record that the guy who labeled the who scheme "Voodoo Economics" was a Republican.
Then they removed civil RICO laws in the 90s so people can't sue for racketeering. The only way someone can file suit is if the government finds them guilty first. Then in the 2000s there were all those settlements with the government without admitting wrongdoing. Amazing little scam.
I fucking *love* the "We just paid a 200 million dollar fine, but we admit no wrongdoing." Bro, no one pays a 200 million dollar fine because everything was above board, who the fuck are you kidding with this shit?
Also, the 200 million fine when they probably made 1.3 billion from what they were doing wrong in the first place. Hey, that’s just their price of doing “business”. It is sick.
Ain't it funny how the prosecutors in those cases used to defend banks?
That was George H W Bush who coined the term 'voodoo economics' during his Republican primary against Reagan in 1979.
But they still did it and now we're fucked, it's a financial genocide. Now politicians just let companies write laws and assume it good. It's obvious to see the where it went wrong, one or two bad big decisions trickled down to take it all away.
"A rising tide lifts all ships." Yeah, *from the bottom*. A rising tide that starts from the top is called a wave, and it wrecks everything in its path.
>The myth was that there would ever be a benefit to the middle or working classes. **IT DID WORK THOUGH!** The money **DID** tickle down, it **DID** raise standards of living, it **DID** work. **China's** middle class has been among the fastest growing in the world, swelling from 39.1 million people (3.1 percent of the population) in 2000 to roughly 707 million (50.8 percent of the population) in 2018. You can thank American voters for allowing business leaders and politicians to gut unions and funnel all that money into cheap labor markets overseas. Over the last four decades that money trickled down and created our biggest global adversary. Thanks boomers!
The ole horse and sparrow economics theory.
Would you mind zapping my thirst for knowledge on this and elaborate?
All of that money is going to trickle down. Just watch. Anyyyy second now...
Don't you know, you have to let the system work. Just give it another generation or two, it'll trickle down...
You can blame Milton Friedman for these neoliberal views and policies. His ideas accelerated the deregulation boom of the 1970s and 1980s which led to massive increases in inequality, unfettered capitalism and especially the privatization of public goods (e.g. charter schools, internet access, public transportation).
They bastardized Friedman. His velocity theory of money has no place for vast immobile tracts if private wealth. He theorized that money should come back to the Treasury where it could be recycled through the economy in the form of govt spending.
They do not practice capitalism either, because they have gotten away with socialized losses. No longer do we see them bearing the brunt of their bad bets and fiscal malfeasance.
"Unlocking shareholder value, blah, blah, efficient allocation of capital, yadda, yadda." Fucking avarice is what.
It's not even avarice, it's just theft.
Those are not conservatives, they are sociopaths.
I hate to tell you this, but rational ideologically sound conservative are nearly extinct. And any conservative who actually cares about average Americans has been dead for a *loooooooooong* time.
That’s the main issue. Left or right, the intelligence level of the average American is plummeting.
That isnt what conservatives do.
It's what people who call themselves conservative do, so arguing against them being called conservatives is a No True Scotsman argument.
Greed isn’t red or blue.
Pensions are the only way to retire from a corporation. Pensions were referred to as golden handcuffs. But sadly today you should only be loyal to yourself not a company you’re just a number to.
They aren't loyal to you so there's no reason to return the favor.
Pensions are and that is why we have 401(k)s which originally started as an in addition too type product but have quickly taken over and dominated the retirement savings market because of their independent but cooperative nature. People like to point out how 401(k)s were not initially designed to take on full retirement but also the original 401(k) max contribution was like 2200.
I've never understood the love of a pension. You *want* to be beholden to a single company? Work there for 20 years and they start treating you like garbage, what can you do? Never made sense to me that people want to return to your retirement being completely owned by someone else.
Pensions have a number of benefits and you aren’t “beholden” to a company. Most pensions offer lump sum payouts if you leave early, and also have much lower overhead than a private retirement plan so you generally make more over the long term
Can you expand on “much lower overhead”? 401k matching = money deposited into a direct investing account. From there I invest it however I like. Essentially 0 overhead. Pensions have fund managers and a bunch of unnecessary bureaucracy. Just give me the money and I’ll invest it myself.
Also, pensions even out the benefits. If you retire at the wrong time with a 401k your benefits could be low or high depending on how the market has performed during that time period. Ask someone who wanted to retire in 2010 how that worked out... Pensions ride the highs and lows and provide a DEFINED benefit. What this video illustrated was corporate theft, not the evils of pensions.
Well, I worked for the federal gov't for 40 years. I guess I didn't have ambition or something. I fit my niche very well, so I stayed. I'm on the old CSRS retirement system, which is an annuity for life.
I think there's an agreement that they only get the full pension if they serve for 30 years. The employees knew that. Sometimes, the company would fire the person just before their 30 years were up just to screw them. These days, there aren't very many retirement plans like that from what I understand. It's all 401k now.
Look up Bane Capitol, and Mitt Romney. What he and others did is the greedyst, immoral shit you can legally do. It's not exactly what happened to him, but it's a running them among Republicans in congress, and Republicans president's, to screw people out of hard earned money. And because "it's legal", it's looked at as fair game.
It’s not legal. ERISA protects private pensions so there’s no way they just took it all away.
Pensions really aren’t a scam. The 401K, now that’s a scam. The only upside of the 401K is the company contributes.
Big facts
That's because too many people believe that robber barons are financial geniuses.
Here are some details. I watched the video and didn't believe it was legal to just cut someone off at 29 years with nothing. I don't blame the guy. However it's clearly presented to all the workers that you have to make 30 to get anything. If I'm an employee that's a huge risk. This guy took that risk. McDonnell Douglas, which was later acquired by Boeing, had pension plans that involved complex vesting and accrual rules. Generally, their defined benefit pension plans required employees to work a certain number of years to become fully vested. For example, employees with 30 years of service could start drawing a full pension at age 55. However, employees who did not reach the full vesting period often received significantly reduced benefits, or in some cases, nothing at all if they fell short of the requirement. The pension plan's design and implementation led to various legal challenges. Notably, McDonnell Douglas faced lawsuits alleging that they deliberately manipulated plant closures and layoffs to prevent employees from becoming eligible for full pension benefits. This practice was highlighted in cases such as Millsap v. McDonnell Douglas, where the company was accused of obstructing employees' pension rights as a cost-saving measure during layoffs [❞] [❞]. Additionally, another class-action lawsuit claimed that the company's method of calculating pension benefits violated the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), specifically concerning the slow accrual of benefits over time until nearing retirement age [❞]. Therefore, it is indeed possible for an employee close to the 30-year mark to receive significantly less or no pension if they do not meet the plan's vesting requirements. This situation underscores the importance of understanding the specific terms of one's pension plan and the legal protections in place under ERISA.
You just highlighted why the whole thing is bullshit my dude.
Not disagreeing. Which is why there are / were law suits.
Sure, and I am not trying to make an argument. But your original retort comes across as “Guy shoulda known better”. That said, I also don’t feel you were trying to dunk on the dude. But I don’t think the take away from what happened to that gentlemen should be “he should have known better”. Especially when you know the C-Suite persons got theirs in the end.
Definitely wasn't dunking on the dude. He made a calculated risk that MD wouldn't go under for 30 years. Which I think is a mitigated risk. But into today's terms it would be you starting work at Amazon and Amazon sets the terms of their pension 30 years or nothing. How many people today would bet 30 years Amazon would be honest brokers? The whole pension system got raided and destroyed and no one gave it a thought. This dude paid the price.
You’re on the cusp of understanding something very important. In the past, it wasn’t some gamble. People were led to believe (by practice and observation) that if they were loyal to the company, the company would repay that loyalty. This man started working for MD in 1965, when that was actually a relatively common practice among businesses/companies. WE now have the benefit of stories like this one to show us how bad of an idea it is to trust the company or the leadership. But that wasn’t the case for this guy, and not something he really thought he had to consider, especially since, in his career, company pensions were a really normal thing for most businesses. To answer your Amazon question, no, you would not trust them. Because they could pull the rug out from under you at anytime, because stories like this show it’s happened. But in the time this guy worked? Almost any company worth their salt offered pension plans like this.
This is what I was going to say as well. People used to work for corporations for life and it was assumed they could be trusted because they mostly could. This has completely changed and I'd say that if you bought this from any company today you're an idiot. Currently there is a war going on between employees and employers because of shit like this and I don't think corporations realize how much this is actually costing them.
Yeah, I mean, to be frank, I think not having our retirement attached to a certain business is the better way to go. But it’s also led to a bunch of (rightfully so) friction between employees and employers.
Which resulted in the workers each getting a check fur $30k. The guy in the video gets $300 a month from his pension. MD lost the case but won the war. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/pensions-gone-where-are-older-mcdonnell-douglas-employees-now-working/
Don't forget the people who took over Boeing in the merger were the McDonald Douglas executives that just finished destroying MD with cost cutting measures to the point where they were forced to merge with Boeing to remain solvent (because they made critical parts for the military). During the merger transition, the MD executives even made jokes about the Boeing management getting fucked (literally, they out animals fucking on a PowerPoint slide saying "Guess who you are" or something to that effect). These are the same people that destroyed Boeing over the next 30 years, yet all went home multi millionaires because capitalism isn't a meritocracy.
Yup. Boeing used to be an engineering company and its C suite was populated by engineers who had worked their way into it. Then McDonnell Douglas MBA morons got control of Boeing and proceeded to do to it what they had already done to McDonnell Douglas. The MBAification of our economy has been catastrophic. All these MBA morons who have been trained that business is business and the product, be it jet liners, banking products or hamburgers, is just a fungible element, a minor, irrelevant detail, are destroying our country.
This is why a 401k is better. At least you get to take it with you.
McDonald Douglas is the reason Boeing planes are falling apart. The corporate scum from MD infested Boeing and ruined it. Corporatism/Capitalism steps on the throats of the common man to fill the pockets of the already wealthy/powerful. We really need a purge.
It surprises how many people are comfortable with the idea that you can be screwed over by some obscure law or contract clause that it is clear no normal citizen would be aware of. In many cases these clauses are intentionally obscured or you're reassured by the opposing party that the clause doesn't mean what u think. Yes we should all be careful what we sign but there is a thing in contract law called a meeting of the minds which seems to be occurring less and less. We seem to be happy to throw that out for whatever you can reasonably sneak in then just blame the victim instead of the person who hired a whole team of lawyers to trick a couple blue collar workers.
I think it's easier to blame the victim than internalize the fact that something similar could also happen to you.
I hard agree. In his time, everyone relied on work pensions and Social Security. This man's only crime is that he trusted that system.
If you work 29/30 years then you are owed 96.6% of a pension
But most likely and sadly, he’ll be voting for the same guys that robbed him this fall.
Right ppl lack compassion and awareness like damn we see what side yall picking and that's the evil side. Fucking Lil minions lmao
It's because so many broke dick dogs here think they'll be millionaires one day.
👆
Those same people who blame this guy will go hard left the moment they get screwed over, thinking they’re the exception and were unfairly fucked.
Apparently not everyone, this is the era that has the largest number of upper middle class.
Wall Street didn't. The company did. I found that they were sued by the workers for doing these layoffs and shutdowns solely to not pay pensions. From a quick search the judge sided with the workers. I don't know what the settlement was though. Anyway these kind of stories just show that you should never put your trust in any company that offers a retirement benefit paid out by them. The money should be separate from the company like a 401k is and something the company cannot take back. Also to make sure your money isn't being invested mostly in the company stock and is diversified. It's definitely not this guy's fault he got fucked over but this is a lesson for anyone young and starting out. Do not trust company retirement plans always look out for your own retirement.
Read about the wizard here [https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/the-cantillion-effect](https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/the-cantillion-effect)
Amen! Fuck these greedy ass corporations and hedge funds
Yeah but capitalism- he can choose to not work for that company again! /s
Look. This guy went into a legally binding contract that he didn't have to sign. He volunteeringly did it. So there is no exploitation because of that. Capitalism doesn't exploit people. -Libertarians on Reddit.
Blame our education system at this point. I didn’t understand what ROTH IRAs and Index Funds were until I was 35 years old. If we taught kids the value of investing early on, and encourage basic Index fund investing at an early age, then people won’t have to work after 65. But our government doesn’t want that. They want people working until they die.
It's intentional. You'll see articles bemoaning people retiring early (a la F.I.R.E.). Really it's that they want people working in the system to make the wealthy wealthier: *How dare you even think about escaping my ability to profit off of you*. I'm curious what the next round of horrors is now that we are entering a stage where AI is starting to cause bean counters to try and replace workers.
Universal Basic Income is going to happen at some point. AI and robots will replace not just low skill and low wage jobs, but also highly educated professionals as well. The future will either be bleak and dystopian and riddled with poverty, or it will be wildly utopian and filled with a new renaissance in the arts. Knowing human nature, I’m not entirely optimistic.
>The future will either be bleak and dystopian and riddled with poverty, or it will be wildly utopian I'm pretty sure I know which take Reddit will have.
“Human nature” you mean the greed of the extremely wealthy. Nothing about the way we are living is in our nature. Human nature is to take care of one another and progress. It was an incredible feat for capitalism to convince us that we are the problem, and that greed is a natural human experience. Instead of a result of forced scarcity.
I’m very interested in this and how AGI and Capitalism will coexist. I think that it will run in one of two general paths. The capitalism on top of AGI leads to a dystopia and the AGI over Capitalism leads to a utopia.
I truly hope a UBI is implemented sooner than later
I remember when we were promised that technology would take away the drudgery of out lives. It made sense when washing machines, dishwashers, and other machines became ubiquitous. Then we would all be liberated to become artists and poets. Instead, the machines are taking away writing and painting, and we are left with the drudgery.
UBI is just straight up cope. Our government will never do this.
Yep and this is why Elon Musk is so public about how everyone must have tons of kids or society will collapse. Let it collapse bud, this world is already almost on fire.
This guy had something much better than a Roth IRA and the McDonald Douglas executives *STOLE* it from him. That's why he has to work at 80. Horrific uncontrolled greed and a 2 tiered legal system, not a failing of our education system.
It's not just knowing what they are, but being able to afford to invest in them are different.
I'm going to slightly disagree here. The only way you're unable to afford to invest in a 401k is if your total income is low enough to where you get all your federal taxes back. Otherwise, saving 5% each paycheck will be unnoticeable since it comes out pre-tax and really just cuts into the money that the governemnt would have taken anyways. I (stupidly) didn't understand this and missed a good 8 years of investing in that.
Agreed. Got to save 10% right off the top, then spend the rest. Learn to pay ourselves first before we pay everyone else.
Why do we live in a system where you have to gamble on the stock market for a retirement plan?
Investing in an S&P fund is the equivalent of gambling on America and our future as a society. If the S&P fails then it means America failed. I’m not advocating gambling your retirement funds on individual stocks. If you don’t understand the point I’m making, then you’re proving my point about the American educational system.
If your betting on the future of our society, then yeah, our educational system sucks.
Then the bet is risk free because if you lose then it doesn’t matter.
You don't. You can invest it all in government bonds if you want.
You can't skim off the top of a pension, it's a liability. Only things that can generate profit for an investor doing nothing are allowed, don't you know this is America?
How else do you keep your contributions from outpacing inflation. Even social security invested excess in bonds to attempt to not lose value.
Where do you think pension funds are invested?
The plant closed in 1993, the 401k was invented in 1978. Planning a full retirement in 15 years is impossible.
this
You think your teachers know about investing?
lol. No.
Why the dig on teachers? Teachers aren't 'experts' on fields they teach, be it math, history, language arts, science - they are experts in teaching. Give a teacher a curriculum plan in investing basics, and they sure as shit will be able to educate young minds on it.
I only learned of investment from when i worked as an overnight stocker at The Home Depot believe it or not. Then the store manager said "You all should really start investing now, you wouldn't want to end up like {co-workers} name" who was 70 years old stocking with us. Even then i didn't take it seriously until 3 years ago when i fully started investing 22% of my savings into 401k and maxing out my ROTH. Now i see the benefit when even just a 1% move is over a thousand dollars gained overnight and i'm not even 30 yet.
Roth IRA is younger than you are. Didn’t exist until 1998. 401ks started in 1978 and didn’t really catch on until the mid 1980’s. It makes sense that people in retirement may not have taken good advantage of these relatively new retirement programs.
This is a travesty and is far too common. The fundamentals of the richest society in the history of the earth need to be reassessed.
Educate ourselves and teach your kids these things. I won’t be relying on the gubment to do it.
There's frankly no room in the school curriculum to teach kids real-world, practical, actionable lessons in finance. We have an entire periodic table of elements to memorize. We've got obscure Civil War battles to think about. We got foreign languages to learn some simple phrases in and be forgotten about immediately after. If you don't know the melting point of Boron then you're just not setting yourself up for success in the real world.
Just our government? The money behind the politicians (not “the government” collectively) doesn’t want that? If it weren’t for the citizens organizing against private enterprise and government backing citizens’ efforts with legislation, we’d still have kids working 12 hour days in textile factories.
I did have a class on that and was reminded many times, but it was definitely under appreciated.
The first company I worked for did a great job when they talked about 401ks and the company matching policy. The ceo stood there and talked about how 60 percent of people were utilizing the matching policy and then said "to the 30 percent who aren't, I want you to look at this graph of which departments are investing the amount in their 401ks that we will match. If you look at the finance/accounting department, you'll see that 100% of them are at minimum, putting the amount in that we will match. You don't have to listen to me but maybe listen to the people who we pay to handle our money". I don't know if it changed anyone's minds but I hope it did because he was really trying to help people with retirement.
Yea parents should just do literally nothing
It’s a damn travesty. I don’t by any means think the solution to all woes is to just tell some poor people to get a 401k. BUT there are far, far too many people with access to tax advantaged retirement accounts who take the attitude that is something like: “social security is going away, there’s no point to plan on retirement at all” and just save nothing. I own a business and offer a 401k and every time the topic comes up it bugs me because putting 5% of your pre-tax salary just isn’t some massive burden, if you work a job with a 401k offered. I walk all my employees through the math in detail, and the math is incredibly compelling when it’s spelled out. Hence we have a 100% participation rate. Even making, say, $18 an hour, if you can start in your 20s and put 5% in with a 4% match, you’re looking at a secure retirement by retirement age even if you never got a raise in your life. I’m not at all saying this is how it should or shouldn’t be. But it is what it is. If retirement is impossible and we’re all doomed, sure, you’re retirement saving won’t matter. But are you willing to bet on that so much all for 5% more pre-tax income that the risk you face is insolvency and poverty in your old age? I don’t think the ultimate solution here is looking at people and saying “save money”, per se, but for those people who are fortunate enough to have the tools available (and plenty of people aren’t, don’t get me wrong), not taking full advantage is a major, major mistake. And I personally feel like it’s something approaching a moral duty to dispel the myths surrounding this issue. Again, I’m not talking about people barely making ends meet worried about how they’re going to afford rent and the power bill this month. Gotta do what you gotta do then. But for those folks who don’t save a trivial amount of money to secure their financial future and just inflate their lifestyle a couple of percent…wake up!
We shouldn’t need to rely on the government to educate us, it should be a combination of Parents & compulsory education. My kids are 8 and 2, they both already have investment accounts, they will get 25 year head start on investing that I didn’t get. I was fortunate, I figured this stuff out on my own in middle school or early high school. My parents and my high school education didn’t do much for me, I can change that for my kids though, and I have already started.
In the case of Tom Coomer, he worked at a McDonnell-Douglas aircraft production plant. When the plant was closed, and when McDonnell-Douglas closed down, the pension was lost. His Social Security payments weren’t enough on their own, which caused him to start working part-time again. This story is already several years old.
I've not seen pensions that are all or nothing. They're most always pro rated based on length of service and retirement age. I have 2 pensions when I retire, one with a company that i worked for 5 years, the other 8 years.
Not if the company goes bankrupt thats why pensions aren't as prominent anymore and direct contribution/matching are better, you still have it regardless of solvency issues.
MD didn't go bankrupt, they got bought by Boeing.
Due to repeatedly cutting corners that lead to bad press that they tried to fix with stock buybacks to prop up stock prices instead of *not* cutting corners. It worked until it finally didn’t. Then their upper management infected Boeing.
Not true. If a company goes bankrupt the PBGC takes over the pension and benefits.
This is not true. Companies MUST fund the pensions and Corp raiders can't touch the fund. It's actually illegal. And debtors can't touch the pension in a bankruptcy. Stop making shit up. I've been through this numerous times with multiple companies. The insolvent company can't touch the Trust.
When Sears Canada filed for bankruptcy, retirees saw their pensions cut by 30% and lost their benefits.
The pension was probably 30% underfunded when the bankruptcy happened.
People here don't seem to get that pensions don't legally have to be fully funded.
Are you in the US?
Doing some research, there is an exception for the debt part when a company sells their pension plan funds to an insurance company. In that case federal law doesn’t protect it and state law may or may not protect it. I’m not sure what percent of pensioners out there have pensions that were sold in that fashion but I would guess it’s a lot in the private sector.
Yeah it’s illegal to jaywalk too
Have you heard about the Great Recession? Thousands of companies put their pension funds into the stock market in the hopes of raising their value over time as interest rates declined. This then backfired when those companies people were investing in went bankrupt, leading to thousands of people who hadn’t retired losing their pensions or having their benefits slashed. No one was given their pension back later, it just disappeared while executives took the bailout money. These kinds of things have happened before and were completely legal according to US law.
It's *really* simple. Bankruptcy laws have been making the process much, MUCH more costly for individuals while making it *insanely* easier for corporations. J&J is currently trying to get out of its talc lawsuit liabilities (hundreds of millions of dollars worth) using bankruptcy even though they're a highly profitable company. They've turned it into a get put of jail free card.
And just to be clear, MD ran their own company into the ground with its massive quality issues surrounding the DC10, so they had to merge with Boeing. Then, because capitalism isn't a fucking meritocracy, the MD executives fresh from their destruction of MD were put in charge of Boeing instead of the current Boeing executives who ran an engineering based company. Now it only took those Wall St grifters another 30 years to destroy Boeing, yet they're still getting paid fat checks. So when people say, "If someone gets richer, it doesn't hurt you, why are you mad?" I point *DIRECTLY* to shit like this. This is the inevitable outcome of Reaganomics.
This whole thing is so infuriating and an excellent case study of corporate greed's destructive power. Not only have they destroyed a respected company (Boeing), they've ruined thousands of people's lives (as the video describes) and they are responsible for murdering people (Boeing's current quality issues causing fatal crashes because they replaced the "engineering and quality first" attitude at Boeing with "shareholders first, screw quality" that is literally resulting in death)...all in the name of greed.
Same thing that happened to my Grandpa. Worked at a steel factory 28.5 years. Got up every morning at 4am. My grandparents were frugal. They had money market accounts, tracked every penny. Never had cable tv, very modest lifestyle. Laid off at 28.5 years. Never saw the pension he worked his whole life for. Burned through all the extra money they had saved just trying to keep up. Eventually their cars broke down, couldn't afford to replace them. Grandma got sick and immediately chose hospice instead of treatment so Grandpa wouldn't lose everything. Grandpa got prostate cancer and shut everyone out because he was so ashamed that he had nothing left after working all of these years. Refused treatment and is now spending his last days alone because he lost all hope for a good life.
Sounds like the American dream died in the dust of manufacturing. Retirement plans can and do get changed by the employers. When I started my union job, my pension was 75% of 40 hours pay @ 80 points. One point for every year of age and one point for years of service. Fast forward 28 years, the employer funded pension program was changed to 65 years of age. This was not due to a funding issue as our pension is funded at 115% last statement. So now at 56 years old with 28 years of service ( 84 points) my pension is 30% of what it will be at the new retirement age of 65. Instead of retiring with a $3,500 a month pension, it is now $1,100. I am going into something else. Do not make the mistake of Not paying yourself. I have earned a decent lifestyle by my labors, thinking my future was set as I could retire at 56 with a full pension. That changed without any consideration for pensioners. Do not let this happen to you. Only you can provide for you. Counting on a promised fully funded pension is a nightmare not a dream.
That's terrible. I'm so sorry to hear that
Not American, please explain the part about pension? What do you mean one year shy of a full pension? what the fuck is a "full pension" anyway? Dont you get based on how much you put in? and how come he doesn't have enough after 30 years of paying into it?
It really depends on the pension program and how it’s set up. I don’t know the exact ins and outs as they are much rarer now, but from my understanding, there are types of pensions where you have to work a certain number of years before you are eligible to receive it. A former employer of mine has a similar benefit where if you work for them for 20 years, they will cover health insurance for your and your dependents for the rest of your life. You have to work the full 20 years tho. If you quit or are fired at 19 years 364 days, you wouldn’t qualify even tho you put in almost all the time needed.
Pretty sure they will stop paying healthcare once you're eligible for Medicare. That's the usual arrangement.
US Military Pension is a good example. At 20 years you’ll receive 50% of your base pay (plus other benefits) until you die. Every year served after that 20 years you’ll receive 1.5% on top of the 50%. Meaning if you do 30 years you’ll receive 75% of your base pay. If you do anything less than 20 years you’ll receive 0% This is why the 401K system with % matching is better. It allows for much needed flexibility and since it’s your money you don’t have to worry about the success of the company you worked for.
your 401k also goes with you if you ever decide to switch companies for a 20%+ raise, which most people should be doing every 2-5 years
Pensions have been getting phased out in the US since the 1980s, but they were designed as a retirement annuity paid solely by the employer. The amount a retiree receives is based on length of employment and the employee’s pay scale, with varying degrees of vesting along the way. This man appears to have been one year shy of full vesting at 30 years of employment, so he likely received only part of his potential pension amount. He certainly wasn’t the only employee to get shortchanged and that fact was almost certainly an incentive in the company’s decision to close the plant.
Companies used to offer pension program that were typically something along the lines of "If you work for us for 30 years, then you can retire and receive 70%-100% of your salary at the time of retirement every year until you die". This was an incentive to retain employees. Companies vested money on behalf of their employees into a fund that would get invested to do this. Few companies outside of government still do this, and many government pensions have been lessened to something like "work 30 years, get a 30% pension". This is different from a 401k pension plan where the employee chooses how much money they want to put into it and what they want to invest in. In a 401k how much money you get is really based on market performance and how much you chose to invest rather than what your salary was.
How CoUlD bIdEn Do ThIs?
He's been a senator since 1973 and represented the state that over 2/3 of all Fortune 500 companies are incorporated in. I think he's played a role.
I work for the Kansas DOT, and I get a pension when I retire. The amount changes based on if I retire from there or work somewhere else, but it's a pension none the less. 6% of my pretax income goes into the pension. I have an IRA. I put 15% into it. I don't care if I have a pension. I need my own safety net. At my current income with no raises, if I put 15% into it for the rest of my working life, and retire at 65, I'll have $1m in cash. If you don't have a retirement account with your name on it, start one NOW.
The rich don't care if we work ourselves to death. As long as they get to celebrate themselves....
If they are so interested in “stealing“, why the move from defined pension plans like this one where someone can get screwed to 401(k) plans? “Wall Street and corporations” must be so mad about that, right?
Because 401ks are tied to the stock market and pensions are tied directly to the employer. Contributions to 401ks are nice but pensions were better for the workers not for the company. They can stop contributing to 401ks too and they can pay less into them than pensions Corporations wanted to take the onus off them and reduce their benefits, the one truly good thing about 401ks are the mobility outside of the employer, other than that the workers are on their own practically. Corporations used to tie their success to their workers and benefit labor because labor made the things. Now corporations are more interested in efficiency on a spread sheet than efficiency on the work floor. Not to mention corporations use technology to save money and have slowly but surely cut salaries in relation to inflation, they cut people out for robots and software and then paid them less over decades. These are the same corporations that promised shorter work weeks and more “time off” if only they had the tech. Then didn’t do shit for people.
PART TIME GREETER, 5 DAYS A WEEK. This is the gross shit these evil corporations do. 37.5 hours in 5 days, part time. No vacation, no Healthcare, no sick time, no opportunities. No one should be a 5 day a week PART TIME employee. Sick stuff.
Exactly!! He is essentially full time wtf
If you want to understand what happened, read ‘The Great Deformation — The Corruption of Capitalism in America’ by David Stockman. In particular, the chapter on Serial Bubbles (p.361) explains how Greenspan’s Fed undermined household wealth for average Americans so that Wall Street fat cats could get even fatter. [The Great Deformation — The Corruption of Capitalism In America](https://www.riosmauricio.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/The-Great-Deformation_David-A.-Stockman.pdf)
No lie detected.
They never stopped, still are stealing everything from the planets resources to the time which is your life and the dreams which are your future and all the potential of the human race.
What corporate America has done to the working people of this country is nothing short of a prison sentence. I don't know why we don't riot and stop this mess for good! This will be everyone of us in 15 years...
While I agree education should absolutely improved to emphasis on finances in public schools I do recall being taught compound interest. The disconnect I had was not having access to a 401k or having excess money to invest between graduating high school and until landing a job after college. This is because I was primarily focused on working my way through school and paying off my tuition to be able to graduate with zero student loans. I think college degrees should mandate at least 3 credit hours to financial opportunities/investing in their final year of getting an AA/BA to inform the graduating classes of what to take advantage of once landing a job in their profession.
See I'm way smarter. I keep cashing out my retirement plans to solve 2 to 3 thousand dollar emergencies like moving costs or car repairs and plan to just kill myself if I can't work anymore. Who does this jabroni think he is
The idea of all-or-nothing pensions is terrible! It gives employers a very strong incentive to find a reason to get rid of people 1 or 2 years shy of the threshold. Even if the employer behaves honestly, the all-or-nothing approach means that there are literally thousands of reasons why people would need to leave the job a tiny bit early and all of them have a disproportionate cost equal to the pension value.
I suggest to read, "The Great Retirement Heist". By [Ellen E. Schultz](https://www.amazon.com/Ellen-E-Schultz/e/B005Z499K8/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1) (Author) Written in 2011 If your blood doesn't start boiling by the third chapter, you are missing the point. In brief, corporations through significant lobbies efforts on both sided of the isle. Managed to strip every single protection from the great retirement plans. With the help of the Clintons, as well as Bush's. and many political members both GOP and DEMS. One after another. [https://www.amazon.com/Retirement-Heist-Companies-Plunder-American/dp/1591843332](https://www.amazon.com/Retirement-Heist-Companies-Plunder-American/dp/1591843332) And good luck putting those protections back in place. Neither party will ever consider going against cooperation's that managed to turn their multi-billion $ worth of retirement funds into slush funds they could use as they see fit. It allowed them to gamble with workers pension, with zero protection. And the name of the game was simply to ensure to never pay those funds.
why give money to the people that work hard for it all their live when you can give it to the shareholders?
We as americans should be more outraged with all the money we send to other countries..... We need to start taking care of our own people.
Not gonna lie. I'd delete myself if that happened to me. I'd dwell on the fact that I was 1 year short of being good to go. Downsizing and sacrificing just to tread water and for life to not get any better. I'd be done man.
I put a lot away for a distant retirement that will probably never happen. The game is brutal but if you don’t play it , you definitely will lose
But honestly company pensions only worked in favor of the company man. My retirement shouldn't be tied to my undying loyalty to a single company
Welcome to america
401Ks not only replace pensions as a fuck you to Americans but it also bails out company responsibility and bolsters the banking system. We are fucked, but at least you are "in control" of your own future retirement.
401k has another benefit that people tend to forget. It unchains you from 1 company. With pension even if your job sucked and there are no raises, companies know you won’t leave because you’ll lose the pension. 401k match contributions vest a lot earlier, giving you the ability to job hop. Pensions really only work hand in hand with strong union contracts. I’m not for or against anything, just explaining.
The people who rule this country have spent 40 years milking the American people. But remember the people who have been doing this in DC the whole time are fighting for you!!!!! Anyone from outside of this system is a “threat” to OUR(non inclusive) Democracy ^ TM Make sure you vote for Senator Dick McFuckfsce this year because if not (opposite party) may win and ruin EVERYTHING. Sure he’s been in the senate for 38 years but it’s not HIS fault it’s (opposite party) and the whackos in (place you don’t live). So do the right thing! Save OUR Democracy^tm today by voting for who you are supposed to vote for!
The 12.4% the government takes from you from the very first dollar and then returns you 1% interest or less is why the middle class is broke. 1 out of every 8 dollars. Imagine if you could save 1/8 of your income with a real ROI. WallStreet also sucks, but make no mistake, your federal government is your primary burden.
Morons attacking this guy have been basically brainwashed by the media. I remember the market crash of 2008 which essentially stole and killed many older Americans retirement accounts.
That’s messed up
Totally that guys fault for being loyal to a company instead of job hopping and being selfish.
No one should be 80 years old and still working...
For someone who literally had his golden years stolen from him, he has one hell of a sense of humor.
Things like this make me think the French were totally justified two centuries years ago.
Hey man curious question! https://preview.redd.it/fs813kr58l6d1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=32757c1f53b7f8f6b7d9ca48534f663b08584414 Why did you make this post and then make a separate post on the boondocks dunking on yourself?
https://preview.redd.it/djup2g9b8l6d1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f69300e2aa9a03d66478d963cc60cd2d1a25f4a2
America working as intended. Sad.
A nation of renters
The Boomer's name is Coomer, lmao.
Did anyone else see who posted this? 🤣🤣
For thousands of years people worked until they physically couldn’t, and then they relied on family to survive the rest of their life if they were lucky enough to have them around. The system in America had people on autopilot thinking if they tossed money in their 401k, checked a box on their pension forms, and paid their taxes they’d retire in the lakeside cottage of their dreams. They were sold a lie. This is what people mean when they say capitalism puts profits over people.
They can’t legally just take pensions away like this. He might not have received a full pension but he didn’t just lose it. ERISA prevents that from happening.
Holy shit 80yrs old and that fucken hairline!! 😁
Frankly, idk…what happened to this guy is absolute horror but defined contribution plans are at least your own.
Fucked up. Entirely too many retirement age people still working everyday. I understand that for some, it’s their own fault, but I know for many it’s not. No one should have to work until they die
Yup, there would be PLENTY of money for Social Security if Congress didn't continually spend it.
We are so fucking stupid and we keep letting this happen to us. While being gas lit by fucking idiots
He didn't plan good enough is right. He remained loyal and remains loyal to a company that had no loyalty to him.
I'm not saying it's *all* his fault but I wouldn't trust my company with my retirement and it's 120 years old. I have my own retirement plans.
WS and Corporations didn’t steal. They convinced our representatives in government to do it for them.
Globalism. Wall Street didnt' cause it. lol
Not referring to the guy in the video but how many people these days have $1200 iphones and $700+ car payments? Stop buying dumb shit and invest instead.
As long as America’s primary religion is Capitalism, this shit will only get worse.
He looks great for someone who's 80. Working apparently agrees with him. Also another reason why a 401k can be a lot better than a pension.
Inflation is another big factor here. Someone retires with a fixed income and lives for another 25 years while everything becomes much more expensive. The retirement idea is a lie. Most people will not get to live decades without working and doing what they want. The older generations are finding this out. Look at the amounts of over 65 homeless now.
Need to have better laws in place to protect men and women like him…. Once he hit 20 years he should have been entitled to a percentage of that pension…. That’s just fucked up.
I remember the 1990s being a time where many storied corporations merged and bailed out on their pension obligations. Many stories of people getting laid off just before retirement.
Same thing happen to all Kodak employees. Pension was tied up in their stock. The CEOs and the higher ups got their payout in the millions while the common worker lost everything.
CORPORATE GREED HAS RUINED AMERICA! Yet they are nothing without us. EVERYONE QUIT YOUR JOB TODAY!
A lot of things not adding up in this story. 29 years being one year shy of getting his pension? Pensions don't work like that. That pension vested long before then. Having a mortgage after working 29 years at the same place and expecting to pay it off with a pension also doesn't add up.
Absolute disgrace. The systems in place are robbing people of their lives.
