Word: pension
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Perhaps the best yardstick to assess the outlook for the later years is the defined-benefit pension, long the gold standard for retirement because it guarantees a fixed income for life. The number of such plans offered by corporations has plunged from 112,200 in 1985 to 29,700 today. Since 1985, the number of active workers covered in the private sector declined from 22 million to 17 million. They are the last members of what once promised to be the U.S.'s golden retirement era, and they are fast disappearing. From 2001 to 2004, nearly 200 corporations...
...course, it's much easier to own a piece of America when you have a pension like Snow's. When he stepped down as head of CSX Corp.--operator of the largest rail network in the eastern U.S.--to take over Treasury, Snow was given a lump-sum pension of $33.2 million. It was based on 44 years of employment at CSX. Unlike most ordinary people, who must work the actual years on which their pension is calculated, Snow was employed just 26 years. The additional 18 years of his CSX employment history were fictional, a gift from the company...
...might be called, is a common executive-retirement practice in corporate America--and one that is spelled out in corporate filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Drew Lewis, the Pennsylvania Republican and onetime head of the U.S. Department of Transportation, got a $1.5 million annual pension when he retired in 1996 as chairman and CEO of Union Pacific Corp. His pension was based on 30 years of service to the company, but he actually worked there only 11 years. The other 19 years of his employment history came courtesy of Union Pacific's board of directors, which included...
...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 to react to the digital revolution and began to lose money in the 1990s. From 1995 to 1998, the company racked up $359 million in losses. As its balance sheet deteriorated, so did the value of its stock...
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...