Senate Pension Bill Not a Local Solution
The Senate pension bill, sent to the President, may or may not be the answer to the country's pension problems but it does not solve the problems of the Oak Ridge DOE contractors' retired work force, i.e., the lack of adequate cost-of-living increases in the past and their effective prohibition in the future by DOE Notice 351.1 unless the increases are specified in a contract. All employees who are retired or will retire under a defined benefit plan without built-in increases will face this problem for as long as fifty-five years when the last vested employees eligible for a defined-benefit plan are retired and deceased.
This is not to say that the bill is not without merit: it greatly strengthens the funding retirements for defined-benefit, pension trust funds and provides for defined-contribution pension plans (401(k)) as an alternative. The serious questions are: will the percent participation of the future employees be high enough and will the investment market be stable enough and profitable enough to make the defined-contribution plan successful. The experts seem to disagree. A lot will depend on future workers.
Regardless of the merits of the bill, the problem of DOE effectively cutting off any improvements to current, defined-benefit plans will remain. Over a post-retirement span of thirty years, the current inflation rate would reduce the buying power of a pension payment to less than 20% of its original value. This is not an equitable treatment of retired employees. Why DOE selects this group of citizens to impoverish while they publicly state a preference for current employees, is difficult to accept. The response is all said in (adapted):
|
Warning to Workers Pause, stranger, as ye pass by, As you are, so once was I, As I am now, so you will be, Prepare for poverty, to follow me. An Old Retiree |
Old retirees may not be worth much in the work place but we
have value in the political market and polling place. Keep writing letters and
voting for our friends.