Wednesday, December 17, 2014

NEW ASSAULT ON THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS: US unions back historic assault on workers’ pensions

US unions back historic assault on workers’ pensions

................... it's hardly a secret that unions have partnered with

Obama's amnesty hoax to legalize Mexico's looting. Millions of

Mexicans illegally in our borders and jobs are just waiting to be

exploited by these historically corrupt unions!


"The unions have long been accomplices in the looting of pensions

and retiree health benefits. In the 1980s, they collaborated with

corporate raiders and executives who stole pension money to

finance leveraged buyouts, fund golden parachutes and conceal

slumping profits. The unions established the closest ties to Wall

Street, peddling such financial scams as Employee Stock Ownership

Plans (ESOPS) that put union officials on corporate boards and left

workers penniless."

US unions back historic assault on workers’ pensions

17 December 2014
Last week, the US Congress approved a bipartisan “pension reform” measure that will undo 40 years of retirement income rights for industrial and other private-sector workers in the United States.

Coming on the heels of the ruling in the Detroit bankruptcy case

overturning state constitutional protections for public employee

pensions, the new measure, included in the federal budget bill

backed by the White House and passed over the weekend, opens

the floodgates to the gutting of pensions for current retirees across

the country and in every sector of the economy.

It marks a major escalation of a social counterrevolution that aims to take back every gain won by workers in the 20th century.

The pension provision was backed by major corporations such as UPS and Kroger and by trade unions that jointly administer so-called “multi-employer” pension plans covering 10 million retired and active workers in the trucking, coal mining, construction and other industries.

Cynically pitched as a means of “saving” financially troubled plans and protecting retiree benefits, the bill allows employer and union trustees to “adjust” monthly pension checks, with cuts expected to range from 10 to 30 percent.

While US employers, with the complicity of the unions, have repeatedly frozen or reduced benefits for future retirees, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) of 1974 prohibited the rescinding or reduction of benefits for those already in retirement. The law made payment of these vested benefits legally binding on employers. It also required corporations to pay into the government’s Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) to insure a portion of the pension benefits if they sought to escape their obligations through bankruptcy.

The new bill permits preemptive cuts in benefits from still-solvent pension funds if the funds are deemed to be in a “critical status.” While the bill ostensibly allows retirees to vote against such cuts, their votes can be overridden if the pension plan is considered big enough to pose a threat to the solvency of the PBGC.

As it is, the average annual pension of the 410,000

retired truck drivers and warehousemen enrolled

in the Teamsters Central States pension fund is

only $15,000. A 10-30 percent cut will throw

hundreds of thousands of retirees and surviving

spouses into poverty and lead to early deaths.

The Pension Rights Center declared that the bill “sets a terrible precedent,” encouraging similar cuts in state and local pension plans as well as in Social Security and Medicare. The Wall Street Journal noted the watershed character of the measure in a December 14 article, headlined “Pension Bill Seen as Model for Further Cuts.”

The financial oligarchy has long coveted the trillions of dollars in

pension money owed to workers. The campaign by both big

business parties and the media over the supposed “pension crisis”

has provided a political cover for theft on a grand scale. The ruling

class seeks nothing less than to turn the clock back to the days when

workers were forced to labor until they dropped dead.

In this attack, the working class faces in the union apparatus an enemy no less savage than the corporations. The pension measure is largely based on the February 2013 document “Solutions, Not Bailouts,” drawn up by the National Coordinating Committee for Multiemployer Plans (NCCMP), a joint labor-management body that includes the Teamsters, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) and several construction unions.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

NO BAILOUTS FOR PENSIONS.... BAILOUTS ARE ONLY FOR CRIMINAL BANKSTERS!!!

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$


As the title of the document implies, the unions reject any call for a Wall Street-style government rescue of the pension funds and accept without question that the working class must pay to keep the funds solvent. The union executives know full well that

the funds have been depleted due to the failure of

corporations to keep up their payments as well as

losses resulting from speculative investments by

union trustees and their Wall Street advisors in the

sub-prime mortgage bubble that crashed in 2007-

08.

In a joint letter urging Senate leaders to pass the legislation, UFCW

President Joseph T. Hansen and the CEO of the Kroger

supermarket chain noted that they had already increased pension

contributions from workers and reduced their benefits.

Nevertheless, Hansen co-wrote: “Unless these plans are allowed to

reduce benefits, nothing can prevent some of these plans from

certain insolvency.” What was needed was further “sacrifice”

insisted Hansen, whose 2013 salary  of $350,960 is ten to twenty

times the average pension of a supermarket worker.

The unions have long been accomplices in the looting of pensions

and retiree health benefits. In the 1980s, they collaborated with

corporate raiders and executives who stole pension money to

finance leveraged buyouts, fund golden parachutes and conceal

slumping profits. The unions established the closest ties to Wall

Street, peddling such financial scams as Employee Stock Ownership

Plans (ESOPS) that put union officials on corporate boards and left

workers penniless.

Even as the number of union members and their wages and benefits plummeted over the ensuing three-and-a-half decades, the businessmen who run the unions parleyed these connections into lucrative careers through the administration of pension, retiree health care and housing investment funds worth hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars.

Established in 2011, the AFL-CIO’s $4 billion Equity Index Fund is a case in point. As a glossy brochure entitled “Investing In Ourselves” boasts, the fund “tracks the S&P 500 closely, outperforming 89 percent of its peer funds in every period measured.”

The unions have a direct financial incentive to lower both the

benefits and life expectancy of workers. They are determined to

reduce payouts from pension funds that provide a source of income

to the parasites who control these misnamed “labor organizations.”

Similarly, as holders of corporate stock, they have a direct interest

in lowering the wages of their members in order to boost profits and

stock prices.

Workers cannot fight the corporate-government attack within the framework of organizations that are completely hostile to their interests. They must rise up against these bureaucratic, corrupt anti-working class outfits and build new, democratic organizations of struggle.

Every day it becomes clearer that the most elementary social rights—to a decent-paying job and a secure retirement—are incompatible with the profit system. Just as clear is the failure of a “labor movement” based on the defense of capitalism and nationalism.

The new organizations of the working class must be part of a mass movement for the international unity of workers in the fight for socialism.

Jerry White



SERVING THE 1%... AMNESTY, IT’S ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED

Income inequality grows FOUR TIMES FASTER under Obama than Bush.


In the two advanced countries with the greatest income inequality, Spain and the United States, job losses and wage cuts accounted for nearly all the increase in inequality.


 

WAGES

AMNESTY: The solution to keep wages depressed


“A more recent national survey by the Federal Reserve, based on 2013 data, suggests the problem has not only persisted as the economy recovered but may even have worsened. More than 30 percent of Americans reported spikes and dips in their incomes. Among that group, 42 percent cited an irregular work schedule; an additional 27 percent blamed a span of joblessness or seasonal work.”


"In the two advanced countries with the greatest income inequality, Spain and the United States, job losses and wage cuts accounted for nearly all the increase in inequality."

US Congress to vote on union-backed plan to cut workers’ pensions



A bipartisan proposal has been added to the US government funding bill now before Congress that would end 40 years of federal law and sanction the reduction of pension payments to millions of retired truckers, coal miners, supermarket, construction workers and other private sector workers.

UNIONS PARTNER WITH WALL STREET-OWNED BARACK OBAMA and MEXICO TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED

These are self-serving lies pumped out by the ruling class through its political servants and media apologists. Since the financial crash of 2008, the Obama administration’s pro-business policies of bank bailouts, virtually free money for the banks from the Federal Reserve, wage and benefit cuts for auto workers, corporate tax cuts and deregulation have transferred trillions from the working class to the super-rich.



Instead, the financial oligarchy that controls the economy and both big-business parties is determined to steal the pensions that tens of millions need to survive and return workers to the dark days when they labored without end until they died.


OBAMA’S AMNESTY HOAX: Soaring welfare for illegals…
they already get our jobs!


"President Obama is going rogue, doubling-down, and driving full speed towards a constitutional crisis," Representative Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican who’s chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said in a statement.



UNIONS JOIN THE DEMOCRAT PARTY,
 
MEXICO AND WALL STREET TO ASSAULT
 
THE AMERICAN WORKER… but haven’t
 
they always been organized crime???


 
UNIONS PARTNER WITH OBAMA AND
WALL STREET TO ASSAULT THE
AMERICAN WORKER WITH AMNESTY
AND OPEN BORDERS… It’s all about keeping
wages depressed

For their part, US trade unions such as the United Auto Workers have functioned as junior partners in the impoverishment and exploitation of the working class, suppressing any opposition to the attack on living standards.


In this corporate America has enjoyed the full backing of the Obama administration and both big business parties, which have slashed food stamps and long-term unemployment benefits. The White House, which orchestrated the slashing of wages in the auto industry restructuring of 2009, has made the lowering of living standards for US workers the centerpiece of its so-called revival of American manufacturing.

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