Word: pensions
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Changing demographics, and high inflation, spell trouble for the funds A pension bomb threatens the U.S. economy. Its fuse may now seem comfortably long, but it is indisputably burning. The toughest issue in the negotiations for a new contract between General Motors and the auto workers was not demands for more pay for the U.A.W.'s 460,000 workers on GM's pay roll, but for increased benefits for its fast-growing legion of retired employees. A big reason why policymakers in Washington are agonizing heavily over Chrysler's petition for federal help is the stark fact...
This bleak demographic problem has been compounded by rising prices and the trend toward earlier retirement. Inflation erodes the real worth of the $280 billion that companies and unions have built up in private pension funds and increases the payout needed to keep the elderly out of poverty. A person who began contributing to a pension fund when he was earning a respectable $2,000 per year in 1939 may now be receiving $6,000 a year from that fund and finding it mighty hard to make do. Earlier retirement, mean while, is shortening the period during which people contribute...
Before long, many industries will have to face up to the changing pension demographics that automakers have already encountered. While in 1970 there were seven current auto workers for every retired one, the ratio now is 3 to 1 and will be 2 to 1 by 1990. Masterful union negotiators, going back to legendary President Walter Reuther, have won their employees some of the best pensions in private industry. This year the union fought for another breakthrough that would tie pension benefits to the cost of living, a plum common to public employees but still almost unknown in the private...
Already, just about every employ with a pension plan is having to pay soaring retirement costs. At Atlantic Richfield, the eighth largest U.S. oil company, the pension payout jumped from $60 million in 1976 to $80 million last year. The pension burden has become heaviest in the older capital-intensive industries such as steel, rubber and farm equipment, often because tough unions have increasingly asked for fringe benefits instead of simple wage hikes. Among other firms carrying particularly weighty pension loads are Uniroyal, Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel and the Budd Co. A great many other firms have not taken care...
Congress can also consider that if Chrysler fails, the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. may have to assume responsibility for about $800 million in insured but unfunded pension obligations to the auto company's employees. "That would be catastrophic," warned one agency official. To pay the bill, the PBGC would have to get special congressional approval to raise the fees that it charges for insuring other companies' pension funds...