Lost Dreams

In our dreams we are one. From the teenager in a first job behind a cash register to a veteran journeyman lineman atop a power line, a secure, healthy retirement is the hoped for reward at the end of our journey.

Today, hundreds of thousands of U.S. workers face the shock of employers dumping pension funds and slashing health care benefits. Canada’s situation is somewhat different, but underfunded pension plans and corporate bankruptcies have led to a similar trail of broken dreams.

In this situation, working people look to their government for action. And what do they get? In the U.S., the answer is: not much.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. For millions of members of organized labor, defined benefit pensions were negotiated rewards that grew with every year of employment. Coupled with Social Security, they were a big part of what made hard work and long hours worth the sacrifice.

Active workers ratified contracts, deferring wage and benefit enhancements for the sake of their elders, knowing that they would someday share in the benefit. In both the U.S. and in Ontario, Canada’s largest province, unions fought for and won back-up for private pension funds from the U.S. Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC) and Ontario’s Pension Benefit Guarantee Fund (PBGF).

What should be a back-up for workers has become a bonanza for employers. Major corporations, including many airlines, are dumping their pension obligations onto the PBGC. When the PBGC takes trusteeship over a failed plan, pension benefits are still paid, but often are reduced, sometimes drastically. The PBGC is now underfunded by some $23.3 billion.

Almost 30 percent of U.S. private sector workers have lost employer-managed pension benefits. One-half of U.S. employers offer no retirement coverage whatsoever.

IBEW members in the U.S. are working hard to convince legislators to take immediate progressive action on pensions. They have an uphill battle. So do our members in Canada, who will go to Parliament in the fall to pursue federal solutions.

On June 30, leaders of the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce approved a bill, H.R. 2830, the so-called "Pension Protection Act." Rather than solving problems, the bill would tamper with workers’ retirement benefits and also unjustly interfere with the collective bargaining process.

The act would prohibit the payment of union-negotiated benefits for workers affected by plant shutdowns, regardless of how well-funded a pension plan is. It would prohibit pension improvements for any plans that are less than 80 percent funded, even when the "improvement" is a simple update just to keep pace with wage growth. Yet management employees will continue to earn benefit improvements.

It is shameful that legislators, who should be protecting the pensions of their constituents, are lining up with entrenched business interests who want to escape all responsibility for worker benefits. "People like to think of employers as social welfare organizations, but they’re not," says a business leader in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.

I never considered the employers I worked for to be a social welfare organization. But I always believed that in return for the skill and hard work, they had a responsibility, expressed through our collective bargaining agreement, to help provide a decent retirement.

Many business and political leaders feel that we need to abandon such productive relationships between labor and capital and replace them with the law of the jungle.

If you believe that folks who work all of their lives deserve the treasure at the end of their journey, let your legislators know now how you feel. Visit www.ibew.org to find your elected officials. Tell them that you will remember their answer the next time you vote.

We must take America back.

Jon F. Walters

International Secretary-Treasurer

  Secretary-
Treasurer’s
Message

July/August 2005 IBEW Journal