The E-Mail Campaign
The E-mail Campaign was
started to request CORRE members to contact members of the legislature and has
been extended in scope to include other suitable e-mails and to include
blogging so members could relate their response experience and make their own
comments on the E-mail stream. The posted Email stream will include only the
messages of general interest. This will meet the needs of members who choose
not to receive copies of the messages. There will be some 'sample letters' from
retirees.
The E-Mail Stream
Pension
Plan Contacts by E-mail
1. Appeal
for E-mails or Letters
2. Appeal
for More E-mails (pending)
3. E-mail:
Jim Park to Rep. John Duncan
3) Appeal for More E-mail Addresses (of Retirees)
4) Joanne Gailor: Shrinking pension causes hardships
5) Letter to the Editor (KnoxNews) – Brooks response to Munger's Article re Pension Plan - Rejected
6) Letters to the Editor (KnoxNews) - Notz and Kevil
7) More Comment on Brumley's Statement on No COLAs – LANL Gets Automatic COLAs
8) Comment on DOE Pension Plan & Trust Fund
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1 –
Appeal for E-mails or Letters
To: All Oak Ridge Contractor Retirees or their Surviving Spouses
Date:
Subject: Pension Plan Adjustments: An Appeal for Help
1) If you are in favor of an upward adjustment to compensate for the increased cost of living, and want to do something about it, please read further.
2) If you are on the Internet please read the analysis of our plight at http://home.comcast.net/~brooks50/PensionInflation.htm (A summary is appended below.)
3) If you still want an upward adjustment, please write to your legislators and tell them so in no uncertain terms. See addresses at: http://www.corre.info/Fed_Govt_Contacts.htm
4) If you are not a member of CORRE and wish to help please join. The one time dues are a real bargain, $20.00. Our current 20 % membership is not as much political clout as 50% or 60% would be.
5) If you would like to help right now, forward this e-mail message to about 10 friends and copy brooks50@comcast.net to add the addresses to the E-mail list.
Appendage
The Pension Plan Brief
A Summary
A. A. Brooks
This is a summary of the Oak Ridge Pension Plan discussions contained elsewhere on this web site and the CORRE Web Site. It is in support of the CORRE and its proposal for equitable pension adjustments.
1) Please: Write your legislators and demand equity: http://www.corre.info/Fed_Govt_Contacts.htm
2) The CORRE proposes an across-the-board adjustment of about 1.3 % per year since retirement and lowering the spousal option reduction to 2% for all past retirees as it is for recent retirees.
3) The Oak Ridge Pension Plan is fully funded even though no new funds have been added since 1984, several contractors ago, and, in fact, DOE on occasions tries to divert these funds to operating funds. All adjustments currently proposed by CORRE would not require any new contributions to the fund, but would merely decrease the surplus in the fund.
4) Many pension plans have an automatic cost of living adjustments based on the BLS CPI or the SSA COLA. These include the following: a) the Social Security System, b) the Federal Government including the retired military and the DOE, c) etc.
5) The equity of a pension plan is expressed by the parameters of its payment model
P = M x A x Y x PPAC/CPIC, where
P = Monthly Pension
M = Multiplier Factor; often in the range of 0.012 to 0.025 (Oak Ridge; 0.012 to 0.015)
A = Monthly Salary Averaged over Last N Years; N is about 5
Y = Years of Service; typically from 10 to 60 years
PPAC is the annual Pension Plan Adjustment Compounded over the retirement period
CPIC is the annual Consumer Price Index Compounded over the retirement period
The compounding is given by the repeated product of (1+PPA) or (1+CPI) for each retirement year.
6) The equity at retirement is determined by the product: M x A x Y. The Oak Ridge Pension Plan has never been generous (compared to other DOE sites Slide 19) and this cannot be cited as a reason for failure to adequately adjust for the cost of living increases. But this is not the current CORRE issue.
7) The long term equity is determined by adjustments in the pension for the increases in the cost of living and is reflected in the ratio: PPAC/CPIC. The Consumer Price Index Compounded (CPIC) is controlled by the market place and the CPI calculated each year by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The Pension Plan Adjustments Compounded (PPAC) are of course determined ultimately by DOE. The current CORRE issue is: Why have these cost of living adjustments been kept so low as to reduce the buying power of a 30 year pension to 54.5 % of its original market value? Where is the equity in this? Simply put, is it fair?
8) Why have the Oak Ridge contractor employees been singled out as the sacrificial lamb? To be slowly reduced to poverty if they are survivors? The costs of 'old age' do not decrease; just look at the pension plan health insurance premiums; Major Medical is up by a factor of six in 20 years, $62 to $374.
9) This author recommends to new employees that they study the pension plan before making a commitment.
10) Please copy/paste this page into an E-mail to about ten other Oak Ridge contractor retirees requesting that they again forward this message to their friends and write (again) to their legislators. Every letter counts.
11) If you are not a CORRE Member, please visit the CORRE Web Site and consider becoming a member. The one time $20 fee is small for good representation and you already have your money back. We could use another thousand members to demonstrate political clout.
Don't Get Mad, Get Even With Inflation
Blogs - None
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2 –
Appeal for More E-Mails (pending)
If At First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again.
Al Brooks & Bob
Henderson –
Well we didn't make it happen the first time, so we'll try again with even more letters to the "power structure". Last time we got a few replies, not counting the 'automatic responses', some sympathy but no apparent action and certainly no increase in the pensions for elder folks. We aren't sure anyone of them even tried to help. Just to remind you of how many ways the Oak Ridge pension plan falls short of the mark, we summarize below:
a) Service credits were not given for wartime services on parts of the Manhattan Project.
b) The multiplier factor (to get from your final wages to your initial pension is 0.014 (was 0.012 for a long time) compared to 0.025 for many of our western colleagues. This is known as 'getting of to a bad start'.
c) Routine cost of living adjustments (COLAs) have been a part of the pension plans of the westerly DOE installations for some time. Routine COLAs are the norm in most of the large USA pension systems such as: Social Security, Federal government employees, TVA, military retirees and many others. Three percent per year may not sound like too much but compounded for twenty years the loss is 45 % (and everything else goes up). The intermittent adjustments have nowhere offset the inflation loss.
d) The money is in the bank. That's right; the trust fund includes enough to pay for adjustments and reforms. If it's equitable, we may as well get it as have operations try to steal it (again) by a 420 transfer (sounds legal, doesn't it? but not very fair).
e) Congress just got their COLAs and they and DOE will get them on their pensions (Remind them).
Well, it wasn't too bad was it? Just started out bad and got worse. Sounds like medical expenses, doesn't?
We, as a group, don't have much economic clout, can't strike or maybe can't man a picket line very long. But we do vote and we shouldn't let anyone forget it. We can also write letters to protest our treatment and perhaps elicit the help of others. We should be able to embarrass the power structure before their peers into doing the 'equitable thing'. We are asking you to do two things: a) send E-mails to the people below (letters and phone calls are also O.K.), and b) pass a copy of this E-mail on to your friends and personally ask them to also write and pass it on. (If you'll send Al Brooks a copy he will add the new names to the master list.) Retirees include surviving spouses, soon-to-be retired and others who will help our cause. Remember, you don't have to be a best selling author to send a letter that will be counted; a poor letter is better than none. Just don't be so polite that they believe you are happy being discriminated against.
Note: Due to congressional security measures following the anthrax scare, E-mail via the congressional systems seems to be the preferred method of contacting legislators but letters and phone will be fine.
This effort is intended as a supplement to the formal CORRE efforts and we endorse the CORRE proposal . We are only trying to get others involved and to pass along supplemental information. The following are some of the current power structure (and their E-mail contacts) that control the Oak Ridge Pension Plan:
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http://frist.senate.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=AboutSenatorFrist.ContactForm |
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http://alexander.senate.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Contact.Home |
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http://www.house.gov/wamp/IMA/get_address4.htm |
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http://www.house.gov/writerep/ |
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http://www.house.gov/writerep/ |
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http://www.energy.gov/engine/content.do?BT_CODE=AD_CU_GENCOM |
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http://www.er.doe.gov/sub/Contact/comments.htm |
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boydg@oro.doe.gov |
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wadsworthj@ornl.gov |
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liedlesd@y12.doe.gov |
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editor@oakridger.com |
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letters@knews.com |
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munger@knews.com |
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3 –
E-mail: Jim Park to Rep. John Duncan
Dear Congressman Duncan:
This note is to remind you
of the serious inequity that Department of Energy policy is imposing on the contractor
retirees from the DOE facilities in Oak Ridge, TN. I'm one of several thousand of those retirees
who have chosen to live in Knoxville, in your congressional district. I feel that you have a responsibility to help
assure equitable treatment for your constituents even though DOE's Oak Ridge
facilities themselves are located in an adjacent congressional district.
As a congressman, you are
one of the proper persons to 'nudge' the DOE and the ORNL operating contractor
to adjust the payments provided by the pension plan to:
1. provide equity with plans
for retirees from other DOE facilities, and
2. slow the relentless decay
of buying power due to inflation.
I retired from the Oak Ridge
National Lab on January 1 of 2000 after 37 years supporting DOE projects in Oak
Ridge. Inflation over 6 years has
already reduced the purchasing power of my pension by about 18%. In addition, the cost of supplemental health
care (deducted from my pension payments for me and my wife) has increased by
13%, 25%, 25%, and 15% in each of the last four years. Without a modernization in the pension
payout, our standard of living will continue to decline.
I note that employees of the
federal government - including DOE staff, the military, and the congress - will
be receiving their annual COLAs soon.
Pensions for those individuals are also protected from inflation. I can't believe that the intent of congress
is to penalize the retirement years of people who worked hard and long to
provide the technology needed for our country's defense - but that is the
effect of freezing the pensions of the Oak Ridge contractor retirees.
The Oak Ridge retirees'
pensions are paltry when compared to those for retirees from the Western DOE
labs, specifically Sandia National Labs (Albuquerque
and Livermore), Los Alamos National Lab (New Mexico), and the Lawrence
Livermore National Lab (California).
Retirees from those facilities have pensions that are indexed for the
cost of living, enabling them to maintain their retirement life style. This increase is supported by annual payments
from the DOE through the operating contractors into the pension plans for those
retirees.
No DOE funds have been added
to the Oak Ridge retirement plans for over 20 years! The funds in the retirement plans have been
carefully managed, supporting pension payments and building a substantial
reserve. With DOE approval, the operating
contractor for ORNL recently increased the pension payments for future
retirees. I am told that the Oak Ridge retirement plans could support catchup payments and annual increases in pension payments
for the present and anticipated retirees for the forseeable
future. That is, the pensions of present
retirees can be adjusted to provide equity with retirees of other DOE labs and
to provide equity with future retirees from ORNL WITHOUT FURTHER CONTRIBUTIONS
to the system from the U. S. Government!
Congressman Duncan, I know
and appreciate your dedication to avoiding deficit spending by the US
Government. I want to emphsize again that adjustments to the pensions for Oak
Ridge retirees will not require any additional appropriations by the
congress. The money is in the plan (and
in the bank) already! The DOE and the
current operating contractors merely need to agree to adjust the pension plans.
Evidently no legislation is
required to make these pension adjustments.
What is required is for the representatives of the effected retirees
(yourself, Senators Frist and Alexander, and Congressman
Wamp among others) to make sure that the DOE and the
operating contractors for the Oak Ridge facilities are aware of their
interest. I will really appreciate your
effort on behalf of me and my fellow retirees.
Thank you very much for
taking time to read this note. I will very much appreciate knowing your
thoughts - and your actions - in correcting this inequity for a group of your
voting constituents.
James E. Park
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The
following appeal was sent to all retirees on list (4 batches) on 1/15/2006:
An Appeal for Additional Retirees E-mail Addresses
Currently we have only 293 e-mail addresses for 11, 000 retirees. We need more addresses to generate letters to legislators and others if we are going to convince anyone this is a problem that matters. We appeal to those current participants to send us more addresses of active CORRE members, retirees, surviving spouses or any others who will help solve this problem. We suggest that in addition to any lists you have that you try to get addresses from past fellow workers especially those in your old divisions. We use these addresses only as blind carbon copy (bcc) lists so they won't be broadcast to the world. If you can forward mail that would work too.
1) Send e-mail addresses to: mailto://brooks50@comcast.net
2) We accept lists of any length even 1.
3) You can copy a list of addresses from the To:, CC:, or BCC: fields into the body of an E-mail. You may also be able to send an Address Book Group as a text file
4)
If you send an attachment, format
it Name (First Last)","Address.
Example: Alfred Brooks,brooks50@comcast.net
5) As a last resort please just send it.
Recent postings to the site (http://home.comcast.net/~brooks50/PensionPlanInformer.htm) are a) a simple blogger on several themes, b) a crucial DOE response to Charlie Price's letter, a new pension plan analysis including the multiplier factor and an analysis of the DOE pension plan model.
Thanks,
Bob Henderson & Al Brooks
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Joanne Gailor, Guest Column, Shrinking
pension causes hardships, The Oak Ridger,
This article describes what
is becoming a reality for many retirees. It is a must read.
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Letter to Editor (KnoxNews) Rejected for Word
Count
The following letter was rejected; firstly, for exceeding the monthly quota of one letter, and secondly, for a word count of over 400 when the limit is 200. "News by the numbers." Rather than truncating it to a meaningless note, it is being 'published' here.
To the Editor
Knoxville News-Sentinel
Via E-mail:letters@knews.com
I would like to thank Frank Munger and the News-Sentinel for the informative column (16 Jan 2006) on the "OR retirees push for pension increase". The statements made by plant administrators when coupled with an analysis of the related pension plans go a long ways to reveal the sources of the problem. I comment on these statements:
Mr. William Brumley - "the plan was never intended to be a cost-of-living adjustment plan". This statement raises the following questions, "What did Mr. Brumley expect a twenty year retire do when faced with the increasing cost-of-living? Why do DOE retirees receive cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) when contractor retirees do not?", "Why do the southwestern sites have both larger multiplier factors AND automatic COLAs?", and why do most of the other federally related retirees receive automatic COLAs, eg., Federal Agencies, the Social Security system, TVA, DOD including the military, etc. Perhaps the pension plan can hold tutorial meetings teaching us old timers "how to suck it in as times get tough."
Mr. Billy Stair – "Our first priority must continue to be making sure that all current and future retirees receive every dollar to which they are entitled". This adds the deepest insult to injury; how different it is from the high praises sung about the hot war and cold war warriors who made possible the superior weapons that ended one war and won the competitive military efforts that subdued the USSR. How soon we forget the service of the old and infirm. Please do not sing our praises again for we now know what they mean. In addition, many of these old retirees have for twenty years worked long hours to assist the DOE in their Environmental program and asked not one farthing for their services. The only thing worse than a thankless child is a thankless generation; there is so many children in it.
Mr. Donald Erbschole - "Y-12 and ORNL rank ninth and 10th out of 31 facilities in providing the most generous benefits." A careful inspection of the charts supplied by Mr. Erbshole and his accompanying letter shows that, indeed, the ORNL and Y-12 pension payments AND the social security payments for a 35 year retiree do add up to 90-95 % of the final wages for the sample which does not include LBNL, LANL, LLNL and Sandia AND further does not consider the effects of inflation and the lack of COLAs. Also by any estimation, Oak Ridge sites are in the middle of the heap not showing a "generous" benefit. Even if it is a reasonable plan on the day you retire; it won't stay that way without COLAs.
I suggest the DOE should restore the rest of the inflationary losses to retirees over and above the paltry COLAs they have made to date. Justice and the goodwill of about 20,000 citizens demand it.
There is supporting analysis at: http://home.comcast.net/~brooks50/CabalCrier.htm
Sincerely,
___________________
Alfred Brooks, Oak Ridge Retiree
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Letter to the Editor by Karl
Notz
Letter to the Editor by Thomas
Kevil
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Found on the Internet – LANL
Retirees Get Automatic COLAs See
page 18 of PDF file.
See statement by Brumley and then ask DOE why it treats LANL one way and
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From The New York Times via
Ron Glass – Community Dependence on Vanished Companies
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/20/business/20auto.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin
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From
Pete Lotts Re DOE Pension Plan
Bob- I did
not do the calculations, but I believe the average pensions
is now worth less than 50% of its original value. That is what we
have been saying and have in our CORRE matetial. This
has been told to every Congregational staff member and to whom we have spoken
and to Wamp personally. Also,
we hammered the point about no contributions.
I think
this is type of thing that needs to go on the blog.
Put it
there and send this info out to the mailing list you have.
Pete
-----
Original Message -----
From: Bob
Henderson
To: Price, Charlie ; Leinius,
Ron ; Brooks,
Al
Cc: Lotts, A. L. (Pete) ; Kuykendall, Charlie ;
Reichle, Dave
Sent:
Subject: What if anything can we say
meaningful about this data?
Folks,
I dug up an EXCEL file on
What can we say about this?
Note: File is found at: RealPeopleHardship.htm
That 2400 persons or spouses have been receiving checks since 1984 when the
last CONTRIBUTION was made by DOE/Contractors to the pension fund. That those
persons buying power is down by 50% for those who retired in 1984 and by 75%
for those who retired in 1975.
That 8500 or so additional folks have retired and starting "drawing down"
the pension fund since the last contribution was made to the fund by
DOE/Contractors in 1984.
That DOE's costs for pensions in
Wonder what additional pension funds would exist there IF DOE had been
providing a fixed contribution plan of say 9% of one's gross monthly
salary into a pension fund since 1984?
DOE
has been having free lunches every day for the last 22 years at the expense of
the retirees in
Thanks,
Bob Henderson