Word: moss
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Sharing a passion for flying gives the two generations a chance to know each other more profoundly. "Grandkids learn to see their grandfather or grandmother not just as someone who reads stories," says Westport, Conn., clinical psychologist Sara Moss Herz, "but as a person with their own activities and interests. It sparks a different way of connecting." Cristina Greig says her grandma Betty Foose's example taught her that girls can do anything they want. Foose treasures letters that Cristina and her sisters have written to her acknowledging her influence in their lives...
...same time corporate executives are paid retirement dollars for years they never worked, hapless employees lose supplemental retirement benefits for a lifetime of actual work. Just ask Betty Moss. She was one of thousands of workers at Polaroid Corp.--the Waltham, Mass., maker of instant cameras and film--who, beginning in 1988, gave up 8% of their salary to underwrite an employee stock-ownership plan, or ESOP. It was created to thwart a corporate takeover and "to provide a retirement benefit" to Polaroid employees to supplement their pension, the company pledged. Alas, it was not to be. Polaroid was slow...
...Moss was one of the losers. Now 60, she spent 35 years at Polaroid, beginning as a file clerk out of high school, then working her way through college at night and eventually rising to be senior regional operations manager in Atlanta. "It was the kind of place people dream of working at," she said. "I can honestly say I never dreaded going to work. It was just the sort of place where good things were always happening." One of those good things was supposed to be the ESOP, touted by the company as a plan that "forced employees...
Once Polaroid entered bankruptcy, Moss and her retired co-workers learned a bitter lesson--that they had no say in the security of benefits they had worked all their lives to accumulate. While the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. (PBGC) agreed to make good on most of their basic pensions, the rest of their benefits--notably the ESOP accounts, along with retirement health care and severance packages--were canceled. The retirees, generally well educated and financially savvy, organized to try to win back some of what they had lost by petitioning bankruptcy court, which would decide how to divide...
Employees did not leave bankruptcy court empty-handed. They all got something in the mail. Moss will never forget the day hers arrived. "I got a check for $47," she recalled. She had lost tens of thousands of dollars in ESOP contributions, health benefits and severance payments. Now she and the rest of Polaroid's other 6,000 retirees were being compensated with $47 checks. "You should have heard the jokes," she said. "How about we all meet at McDonald's and spend...