Wow. I can’t even.
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I hear they don’t shower and kick their dog.
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As most lawyers will tell you, they’re paid for convincing the jury, not necessarily for being right. This still stinks to high heaven, tho.
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This just in! Unions “target” dissatisfied workers
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Hutt’s case was not brought as a worker’s compensation claim or a claim against Grace. Instead, it alleged successfully that Maryland Casualty had a duty as the administrator of Grace’s safety plan in Libby to warn workers of the hazards.
“Grace and MCC worked together to transfer ill employees to areas with reduced concentrations of asbestos dust in order to avoid insurance liability,” wrote Justice Ingrid Gustafson in a concurring opinion. “MCC was not merely negligent in its failure to act; rather, in strategically recognizing the latency period for asbestosis to develop, MCC engaged in affirmative actions to conceal the asbestos exposure risk and worker injuries to avoid liability, effectively increasing the risk of additional harm to mill workers from further asbestos exposure.”
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Wasn’t sure this fit here (given (some of) the salaries probably involved) – but I’ll err on the side of “it’s not unrelated”
Non-paywall: archive.ph
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‘This is a historic opportunity’: Oregon advances bill extending overtime pay to farmworkers
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Invest your retirement savings, they said. You’ll be able to buy your own private island they said!
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Stuff like this is why workers are advised to manage their own money, as soon as they get the chance. Most are offered the option to roll over their funds into private accounts, and that opportunity is sometimes provided only once. Between corporations raiding pension funds, underfunded federal protections for pensions, and firms going out like Enron, it’s the only way to be sure they know where their money is invested.
Lack of financial education is yet another way workers are set up to be victims of wage theft. It’s not that difficult, but there’s money to be made in convincing people that it’s hard to learn or too complicated to manage.
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The old system has its flaws, but the shift to every individual managing their own retirement account has loaded all the risks onto the individual employee and has done away with the guaranteed income that the old system provided.
It has also made it necessary to have a level of financial knowledge to run and make decisions on your pension, in a world where most people haven’t been given this sort of education, and where the penalty for choosing the wrong advice (and there’s plenty of that out there, even beyond the obvious scams) is poverty in old age.
Even fairly knowledgeable people now have no fucking clue if they are saving enough for retirement, or if they’ll ever be able to retire. Because future market performance is inherently un-knowable.
Of course, there is another way in which things could be set up, which would provide security of income without loading all the risk on the individual. You could have the pension funds held outside the company, by a combination of unions with government oversight- with transparency and regulation you could provide pensions while guarding against mismanagement.
Of course, another slight side-effect of this sort of policy is that over time as a generation of workers paid into the system, eventually workers would collectively hold a large enough stake in the companies that make up the national economy, that they could start taking control of these companies. A system such as this was suggested in Sweden by PM Olof Palme, and I’m sure his reason for vacating that position was entirely unrelated to this proposal.
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I like the alternative idea of pension funds held outside of the company. Too many firms have engaged in unethical pension practices or made investment decisions that were suspect, in highly publicized cases. I’d guess that most workers have no clue where their money is being invested until it makes the news.
We have workers facing the same thing because of the actions of their employers. It comes down to a choice of managing their own savings/earnings, or leaving the money in the hands of someone else and hoping they won’t get robbed or find everything’s been mismanaged for decades. There are ways to get low-cost or free advice (without scams), and to manage expectations (avoiding get rich quick schemes). We need more of this:
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My wife is terrified of market volatility. As soon as we were able, she move ours retirement funds into a guaranteed 3% return money market account. The results have been steady, unspectacular and set us up or a nice, cozy retirement. Did I mention she does all the financial planning for us?
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Have I told you the story of my friend’s parents, both tenured college profs, who had the option to switch to a 401k from their pension plan in the 90s and refused. Pretty much all their colleagues switched, and most of them lost a ton of value in the 2008 crash - but not my friend’s parents.
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Another thing to watch out for (perhaps off topic; perhaps somewhere under the workers’ rights umbrella) is that while an employee might have a 401k account, the plan belongs to the employer. I’m not sure what happens to the plan if the employer goes out of business*, although I came really close to finding out. The money is the employee’s, but (unless I’m misremembering) the company still controls the “container” (regardless of whether that’s at Fidelity, Voya, Principal or whereever).
*I mean completely, e.g. one of the owners is no longer in the country, while the other one still is, but doing Federal time; no custodian for the assets (that haven’t already been seized); etc., etc.
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Well, Enron was the case that really caught people’s attention:
As mentioned in the meltdown article I posted above, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation has a lot to do with how much money a worker will get back. Another big factor is the amount of plan investment in company stock. The plan does belong to the employer, which is why whenever I left a job I followed advice to roll those funds over into my own account. I’ve had a couple of past dot-com-turned-dot-bomb employers go under, but it barely affected me, because they no longer had control over my retirement funds, and I wasn’t holding onto a lot of their stock.
This is why when people complain about the work required to manage their own money, I ask the following question. Based on your past experience with your company, do you trust them to do the right thing by you and manage your money well in the future (assuming it has a future)? If the answer is yes, good for them. If the answer is no, I recommend rolling that money over, and spending some time learning the ABCs and 123s of saving and investing for retirement.
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A stool needs three legs - a pension, savings and social security.
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