September 29, 2011 - As companies have been moving away from traditional pension plans, they have been shifting employees to new retirement plans, such as 401(k)s, that transfer the cost — and the risk — to workers.
Companies have claimed for years that old-style pensions were unsustainable. Author Ellen Schultz tells Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep that there's another explanation.
"The main narrative is that [companies] are struggling to pay both their pensions and these unexpectedly high health care costs for the retirees," Schultz says. "What isn't known is that companies were well-prepared for this phenomenon. The plans were in fact significantly overfunded. They had more than enough to pay every dime for every person currently employed and already retired."
Schultz investigated the changes in pension plans as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal and has written a book called "Retirement Heist: How Companies Plunder and Profit from the Nest Eggs of American Workers".
In the early 1990s, Schultz says, companies were looking for new ways to push out workers, especially older, more expensive ones. She says the expensive way would have been to pay severance, "but the cost-effective way was to instead promise them a bit more pension money in lieu of severance." In the end, "you've just laid off somebody who's expensive and it has cost you nothing." read more>>>
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