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FOUR CORPORATIONS THAT DUMPED EMPLOYEE PENSION PLANS PAID TO EXECS $50 MILLION IN RETIREMENT BENEFITS
USA Today - Top executives at four companies that jettisoned their employee pension plans received $49.5 million in retirement and severance benefits in the years before the companies filed for bankruptcy, while retirees saw their benefits cut by as much as two thirds, congressional investigators conclude . . . The Government Accountability Office reports that pensions at the companies, United Airlines, US Airways, Polaroid and Reliance Insurance, were underfunded by more than $11 billion when the companies turned them over to a government-backed insurance fund. The report says executives at those four companies and six others that abandoned their pension plans took in a total of $350 million in pay and perks in the years leading up to the bankruptcies.
4 Comments:
Look, to get the "best and the brightest" costs money. We should be proud of our executives - they lead the world in knowing how to release the maximum value out of their corporations. They are, by any measure, absolute geniuses. Nowhere is it written that the executives in these corporations should care about their employees, They, the employees, are resources. Simply resources. Why else do corporations call it the "Human Resources Department" rather than the older term, "Personnel"?
Where do these resources get the idea that the pension money belongs to them? Do desks get pensions? Do desks and chairs have rights? Since when do the interests of resources matter? When you don't need them any more, get rid of them in the cheapest way possible. That's the smart, cost effective way to manage companies. I'm pretty sure that's what they teach at Harvard B-school, and Wharton, etc, etc, etc.
I'm not sure Anonymous is being serious or merely facetious... Whatever the case may be, he has put in a nutshell the reason why capitalism and christianity are at opposite poles of the ethical spectrum... People must be considered persons, not "resources" and any political thinking that allows for any person to be dehumanized and turned into a "resource" is FASCISTIC FROM A TO Z...
MAMADOC, I'm being facetious. I abominate the current thinking in most corporations. But the fact that you cannot discern whether my post is serious or facetious is deliberate on my part. It's meant to be indeterminate. In this way it echos reality. Our so-called leaders intone concepts that supposedly are to make things better for everyone, but in fact are actually deleterious to most and beneficial to the very few (which includes them, of course). The average worker in these corporations isn't quite sure what he is hearing. That's deliberate. In the same way, my post is also puzzling.
Brilliant (and convenient... given the circumstances). Yes, the way some of these ideas such as "development", to take another example, have deformed our thinking is beyond belief. The left and the right are equally stupid on this one. It's just one more example of how "the state in its efforts to control beyond where it can effectively impose itself, destroys everything..." (Simone Weil, 1909-1943). Ivan Illich talks about how the effort to "do away with poverty" has only managed to create MISERY... in lieu of good, old more or less palatable poverty... :--)
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