Posts tagged pension plans
Warn workers before unions persuade them to join underwater pension funds
June 13, 2024 // Unions know their pension plans are in serious trouble. The Teamsters have already begged the Biden administration for a $36 billion bailout. At least $127 million of that money went to about 3,500 dead recipients, which was returned only after Sen. Cassidy, Louisiana Republican, investigated the “wrongfully obtained funds.” Yet other union pension plans are still on the road to failure, and no amount of taxpayer money can paper over the underlying challenges they face.
General Motors workers in Michigan reject United Auto Workers’ deal
November 9, 2023 // The union’s historic concessions from the automakers are a far cry from the UAW’s stated goals during the strike. UAW President Shawn Fain had repeatedly demanded 40% pay raises, the reintroduction of pension plans and a reduced four-day workweek. The union did not secure pension plans or a reduced work week, and the pay increases top out at just over 20%.
Opinion: Radical Unions Elected Biden, Chaos Ensues on International Front, but Others Bank on Same Formula
October 26, 2023 // Additionally, Biden unveiled a $400 billion American Jobs Plan designed to force thousands of Medicaid home healthcare providers back into the union membership they declined following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2014 ruling in Harris v. Quinn. Unofficially, Biden waited weeks to survey the damage in fire-ravaged Hawaii and still hasn’t visited East Palestine, Ohio, where a 38-car train wreck last February created a huge hazardous waste disaster. But he saw fit to wade into a private-sector labor dispute by siding with the striking United Auto Workers and became the first sitting president in history to join a picket line.
Terence Crawford Takes Aim at Boxing Corruption, Wants to Start Union
August 18, 2023 // “If all of the top fighters with a name and a brand behind them came together, we could make change,” he said. “We have different races, different ages, different countries — it’s everyone from all walks of life coming together. I think it can be done.” In January 2022, Crawford filed a lawsuit seeking nearly $10 million against his former promoter Bob Arum of Top Rank, accusing him of racial bias against promoting Black fighters. “Boxing is one of the most corrupted sports there is and ever [has] been in the history of sports,” Crawford said in another interview with Boardroom. “We’ll take a $5 million guarantee not knowing there’s $30 million dollars that we missed,” he added. “Once I started asking [contract] questions and learning a bit here and there, it became a problem between me and my old promoter, and at that point in time, I knew it was time to go.”
If You Like Your Uber, Can You Keep Your Uber?
October 14, 2022 // Democratic administrations favor having fewer independent contractors and a standardized set of benefits. This gives more power to unions to organize workers. If Uber were the employer of all drivers, a union could ask Uber to support unionizing the labor force. It is practically impossible to organize independent contractors. Public sector unions made 90 percent of their contributions to Democratic candidates in the 2020 election cycle, according to OpenSecrets.com. With the share of wage and salary workers who belong to unions declining from 20 percent in 1983 to 10 percent in 2021, unions are under pressure to recruit more members to fund union officials’ salaries and member pension plans.
Opinion: Biden’s pension ‘guarantee’ stretches the law to bail out unions
July 15, 2022 // “PBGC has, after this further review of the statute, additional consultation with its Board agencies [Treasury, DOL, and, Commerce], consideration of comments, and extensive actuarial modeling, determined that an alternative interpretation… is reasonable and more likely to result in the [taxpayer funds] an eligible plan receives being sufficient for the plan to pay full benefits through 2051.” There is no limiting principle on the spending of taxpayer money if agencies can disregard the law with the hope no one has the standing to obtain judicial review. PBGC’s rationale that the American Rescue Plan’s goal to keep plans going through 2051 justifies overriding the statute to change the interest rate would also justify illegally pumping additional billions into plans if they run out of money before 2051, which is exactly what President Biden “guaranteed” on Wednesday. The bailout will cover only a small fraction of the $757 billion of underfunding in the plans. More than 95 percent of the system’s 11 million participants are in plans less than 60 percent funded. Why not also ignore the law’s eligibility criteria and bailout other plans? Chevron v Natural Resources Defense Council, Majority Leader Charles Schumer