boycott united forever

"gatt" wrote in message
...
If they're smart, they'll leave. The company has already shown what its
word is worth. Would you work for someone that broke promises to pay
you?

My dad worked there for 24 years. They laid him off before he could
retire,
but he was promised his pension when he reached retirement age. Too late
for to "leave."

Are you saying my father isn't "smart"? Are you saying that company
loyalty
and hard work isn't smart?

-c


Well the infomation that UAL was not funding the pension obligation was/is
readily availible in Uniteds SEC filings. Personally if I was depending on
someone/something to send me money for decades, I would verify that the
money was there. The reality is that this might be too much to expect from
individual employees, but there is no excuse for the unions not demanding
that the pension plans be funded.

Mike
MU-2

"John Galban" wrote in message
oups.com...

gatt wrote:

Are you saying my father isn't "smart"? Are you saying that company
loyalty
and hard work isn't smart?


I'm really sorry to hear about your father's financial predicament,
but to answer your question, hard work is very smart, company loyalty
is an anachronism from a bygone era. It hasn't been a relevant concept
for decades.

Pledging your future to a faceless corporation is great for the
corporation, but as your father found out, it's a one-way street.
Tactics like getting rid of an employee on the eve of retirement (to
save a few bucks) are fairly commonplace. On top of that, banking
your retirement on the fact that a corporation will not only be in
business, but be profitable enough to support all of the former
employees is quite a gamble. Even large corporations fold on a fairly
regular basis.

I've only been in the workforce for about 26 yrs and have never
understood pensions. It requires a huge leap of faith in a
corporation. I equate it to keeping all of your retirement savings in
one stock. Not a financially sound move by any measure.

John Galban=====N4BQ (PA28-180)


It isn't supposed to require either a leap of faith or the company remaining
in business. The Company is suppose to deposit money to fund the pension
plan which is a trust with an independent board. The funds are
professionally managed and, barring catastrophe, there should be enough to
pay the promised benefits.

Mike
MU-2

Robert Reich's big question: Do facts still matter?
By Peter Schrag -- Bee Columnist
Published 2:15 am PDT Wednesday, May 11, 2005

Former Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich, now
teaching public policy at Berkeley, has been going around asking a
portentous question: As the wage and wealth gaps between the rich and
poor grow to unprecedented proportions in America, will we snap back
or snap apart?

Snapping back is what the nation has always done in the past. After
the depredations of the Gilded Age, the sweatshops, the 14-hour days
even for children, the Populists and then the Progressives succeeded
in enacting antitrust and wage and hour laws, interstate commerce
regulation, the progressive income tax, pure food and drug laws and a
long list of others.

Together, Reich said, those reforms brought things back to tolerable
levels.

Ditto during the Depression, with laws recognizing the right of labor
to organize and strike; enactment of Social Security, banking and
securities regulations; and establishment of hundreds of public works
projects to put people back to work - roads, bridges, schools, water
and power systems.

But Reich, a former Rhodes Scholar, also warns about another
scenario. "If we don't snap back," he said, "we snap apart into
different societies" that have little contact with one another, and
where the poor lose the classic American expectation that with enough
effort they can make it into the middle class.

That snapping apart fuels the politics of resentment and makes the
nation susceptible to all sorts of demagoguery - about race and
religion, about immigrants, about gays, about elites. As he talked
about it recently at the Public Policy Institute of California, it was
hard not to believe it was already happening. "Are we living in a
madhouse?" Reich asked.

And then another question: Do facts still matter? Every day brings
more material to underline the question: yet another round of
attempts, at a time when the nation is already falling behind China,
India and Korea in science education, to eviscerate Darwinian
evolution. Teachers all over the country are afraid to fully discuss
it.

And as we all know, there's the ongoing falsification by one
government agency after another of data on everything from the WMDs
Iraq didn't have to the cost of the Medicare drug bill to the effects
of global warming. Instead, we have the facile morphing of "values"
with sectarian beliefs.

The country is beset with urgent issues from the multitrillion-dollar
federal debt to a health care system that's as unfair and expensive as
it's wasteful and often corrupt, to an education system that now runs
a poor second or third to those of the nation's economic
competitors. We are stuck in a "war" from which there seems to be no
exit in a region where our misbegotten policies grow terrorists faster
than we can kill them.

But instead of facing and debating those issues, we're preoccupied
with our religious wars - diversionary issues about who's the godliest
among us. We are fixated on steroids in baseball, and on Terri Schiavo
and Michael Jackson; and about a federal REAL ID Act bill without any
study or test to deny driver's licenses to illegal aliens, which will
make things tougher and more expensive for every American at every DMV
office, but which probably won't buy us a nickel's worth of additional
security.

In the past, tough times brought waves of reformist legislative trials
in the states - a lot of federal reform legislation was further tested
and implemented in the states. But in this state, a generation of
efforts to dig ourselves out of our self-inflicted budgetary and
governmental mess seems just to have dug the hole deeper and made the
system even less comprehensible.

It may not be all our fault. Given the global economy and the
technological revolutions that enlarge the gaps in income and wealth
between those with an advanced education and those without, along with
the federal tax, health and foreign policies that, rather than
ameliorating the gaps, exacerbate their effects, there may be only so
much that even a state such as California can do.

That's not to say we couldn't do a lot better - in education, in
health care, in housing. And we could certainly stop trying to do
worse, as the state has been doing. By themselves, the piecemeal and
inconsistent ad hoc lunges of the governor and Legislature don't
address any fundamental problems. As the Legislative Analyst's Office
has pointed out, the governor's budget reform initiative, the only big
thing proposed, can only make the system more rigid and opaque.

Even if everything passes that the governor has said he wanted,
including his long string of abandoned "oh, nevermind" proposals, it
will not change California government and budgeting very much.

In another era, we might have helped lead the nation to brighter
prospects. We did that with our pioneering environmental and civil
rights laws; in creating the greatest public higher education system
on Earth; and with our parks and freeways. But does anyone expect
anything like that now?

Snap back or snap apart.

"Gig" == Gig 601XL Builder" wr.giacona@coxDOTnet writes:

Gig Labor is supposed to be the first thing paid.

It will be. Oh wait, that's the CEO class salaries and perks that are
going to be paid. Well hell, with the Cheney administration what did
you expect?

"Mike Rapoport" wrote in message
nk.net...
Good points all! To add another: Anybody, including United employees
could see, in easily obtainable documents, that United was not funding its
pension obligations for many, many years. Any United employee who is
surprised that they aren't going to get their pension is a fool. The
handwriting has been on the wall for years, perhaps decades.

Is it every employee's responsibility to monitor pension funding? If not,
who's responsibility is it?

Just because the information is publicly available, that doesn't mean it's
the fault of someone other than the entity responsible for actually funding
the pension that it didn't get funded.

I can see good reasons for why the "victims" here aren't entirely blameless.
But put blame on them just because they weren't performing watch-dog duties
seems unreasonable.

Pete

On Thu, 12 May 2005 20:41:06 GMT, "Jay Honeck"
wrote:

Are you saying my father isn't "smart"? Are you saying that company
loyalty
and hard work isn't smart?

No, your father was crapped on.

"Company loyalty" is a myth. In my years in the corporate world, I saw no
loyalty, either from the company, or from the workers.

Which is just one reason I choose to be in business for myself, despite the
risks.

I've been working for a Fortune 500 company for a little over five
years. 2 years ago, the pension benefits in place when I was hired
were reduced by 80%. Employees with 15 years service were
"grandfathered" and kept the old plan, the rest of us took it in the
shorts. At the same time, the company 401k "matching" contribution was
cut in half.

Good friend of mine was employed by another local Fortune 500 company
for 20 1/2 years. He was "downsized", still does the exact same job,
works in the same office, but is now employed by the "contract"
company hired to replace his department. Of course his salary was
reduced drastically, and the benefits are poor.

I guess I'm not sure what point Mr. gatt is trying to make. **** like
this happens every day.

TC

"gatt" wrote in message ...
The best way to solve this problem would be to take the CEO, shoot him
through the head and hang his corpse from a Wall Street lamp post so that
every other executive out there remembers, for example, why the french
still
celebrate Bastille Day. But we can't do that.

Who says you can't? Feel free... I won't tell...

Jay Honeck wrote:


Speaking as one of the millions who have never had a pension plan -- and
never will -- $45K per year for sitting around the house sounds pretty
danged good.

You seem to think a pension is some kind of welfare.
It's money you arranged to have taken out of your paycheck, to save up
for retirement.

You know...a "personal account."

And the "sitting around" part is supposed to be the retirement they
worked for all those years. They were wrong to plan for that?

One of us seems to be failing to understand something...

Montblack wrote:

6. Morning shift at McDonald's is usually the older English speaking
gals.

Home Depot pays more and has more interesting work.

George Patterson
There's plenty of room for all of God's creatures. Right next to the
mashed potatoes.

Andrew Gideon wrote:

If they're smart, they'll leave.

He asked where they would go. Got an answer?

The company has already shown what its
word is worth. Would you work for someone that broke promises to pay you?

I would as long as I couldn't find a job elsewhere.

George Patterson
There's plenty of room for all of God's creatures. Right next to the
mashed potatoes.