With a strong directive from the Bush administration, Congress set out more than a year ago to fashion legislation that would protect America's private pension system, tightening the rules to make sure companies set aside enough money to make good on their promises to employees. ...In the end, lawmakers modified many of the proposed rules, allowing companies more time to cover pension shortfalls, to make more forgiving estimates about how much they will owe workers in the future and even sometimes to assume that their workers will die younger than the rest of the population. ...The reform of the pension system is being undertaken at a time when it is reeling from a series of big bankruptcies, like those of United Airlines and Bethlehem Steel, that sent billions of dollars worth of obligations to the pension agency. The agency's pension insurance is limited, and a growing number of these companies' employees have discovered to their dismay that their benefits exceed the limits and that they will simply lose part of the money they had been promised. ...Boehner, Republican of Ohio and the new House majority leader who was one of the driving forces behind pension reform, defended the House bill, arguing that many specific measures, particularly those phasing in the new rules slowly, were necessary. ...The law that Congress wants to amend was enacted in 1974 after a series of scandals in the auto industry in which employees of dying companies like Studebaker and Packard discovered that little or nothing had been set aside for their pensions. ...From the start of the legislative process, lobbyists representing a wide swath of American business, including those from the United States Chamber of Commerce, the American Benefits Council and the Erisa Industry Committee (which represents large companies with pension plans), argued for easing the burden on companies by allowing them more latitude in estimating how long their workers would live, for example, and what they would need to set aside for future payouts. ...The Senate bill would also help recover more than $1 billion of benefits that thousands of pilots for Braniff, PanAm, Eastern, United and other airlines have lost in bankruptcy cases going back as far as the 1980's. ...Lampert, chairman of Sears Holdings, which is responsible for the pension plans of employees at Kmart and Sears, complained that his company's pension insurance premiums were going up by 60 percent, "not in order to address any risk associated with Sears, but rather to make up for the difficulties of other companies." ...Lautenberg, a Democrat from New Jersey (where Prudential has its headquarters), that the companies which are more than 15 percent overfunded should be allowed to remove some of the surplus and use the money to buy health insurance for retirees. ...Robert DeFillippo, a Prudential spokesman, said that the provision would improve pension security because in exchange for the ability to take more money out of the pension fund, the company would be required to handle the remaining money in the pension fund much more carefully. ..."The Senate advice provision does little more than restate current law, which has left workers to fend for themselves without the type of quality advice they so desperately need," he said. You are subscribed as roessler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/ |