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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (37692)	4/3/2004 4:38:05 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793720

Good companies want the best employees. To get the best employees they have to provide competitive compensation and treat their employees well. In principle, that's the case; in practice, it's definitely a mixed bag. Take the case of older workers. Those pension reduction plans of corporate management strike them at a point of much diminished mobility. It's not easy at 55 to say, well so you guys are reducing pension benefits, I'll just walk across the street where I can get what I'm getting here, therefore you should keep these at their present levels. As you know, it won't work that way. So your union manages to hang on to your pension and effect a lot of other workplace practices aka productivity drags but then your company becomes uncompetitive and folds before you can collect the pension. This is helpful, how? Well, that's of course, the way management always presents these cases but then they turn around and award astronomical salaries and benefits, remember stock options, to their upper ranks. I don't buy this story. If companies wished to put pension benefits into 401k plans, that's fine; but they don't. They want those in their own plans so they can reap the income from the pension plans. You may recall a number of companies simply used higher returns on pension plans in the late 90s to boost their earnings results. Gotta have unions to protect worker rights.