Word: pensionable
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...history of pensions in the U.S. throws some light on the "how." The first industrial pension plan was set up by the American Express Co. in 1875. It provided company-paid benefits (maximum : $500 a year) for incapacitated workers over 60 whom the company deemed worthy and who had been with the company for 20 years or more. The railroads soon followed; by 1908, railroad retirement plans covered two-thirds of all U.S. railroad workers...
Manufacturers who installed pension plans at the time did so on a highly informal, unilateral basis. "The company," one of the early plans stipulated, "may cancel any pension whenever . . . the pensioner displays a decided lack of appreciation . . . or is guilty of other serious misconduct . . ." By 1929 industrial pension plans covered 1,451,485 workers. Most of the benefits were paid entirely by the employer, and employees contributed nothing; most of the plans were on a pay-as-you-go basis, i.e., the benefits were paid out of current earnings...
When the Depression put the pension plans to their first great test, many flunked it. As profits vanished, so did the pay-as-you-go pensions. Even the long-standing railroad plans faltered and had to be taken over by the Government.* When thousands of elderly workers finally realized the chilling fact that they would probably never find jobs again, a spate of fuzzy-brained solutions sprang up, e.g., the Townsend Plan, Upton Sinclair's E.P.I.C. (End Poverty in California). It was partially as a counterattack to them that federal Social Security-handled by the Government and paid...
...million men & women in the U.S. working force today, only 35 million are currently earning credits (i.e., putting more aside) under Social Security. But millions more are covered by other public programs. Some 3,000,000 veterans and their widows and dependents are now covered under tax-supported pension plans. The Federal Government has a complex system for its 2,300,000 employees; special plans also cover members of Congress,* the foreign service, the armed forces, and a sprinkling of minor bureaus from the Tennessee Valley Authority to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. State and local governments...
Once the U.S. had accepted the idea of pensions on a broad scale, private industrial plans spread rapidly, notably during World War II when the sky-high excess-profits tax made it possible for an employer to put $1,000,000 into a pension fund at a net cost of only $150,000. Today U.S. corporations have 13,000 retirement plans covering some 7,000,000 workers. On their own initiative, Americans have individually bought annuities that will pay them at least $750 million annually in their declining years, and are adding to this prospective income at a rate...