CWA:IBM Assaults Employees' Retirement
Security
January 6, 2006
Following is a statement by CWA President Larry
Cohen on IBM's plan to freeze employee pensions:
The announcement by IBM Corp. that it is
freezing the pensions of some 120,000 employees is
outrageous, even by the "Gilded Age" standard of today's
corporate executives.
Just over the past few
weeks, we've seen some of the richest corporations
eliminating pension benefits wherever they can, just
because they can. Verizon recently froze pensions for
tens of thousands of management and unrepresented
workers. IBM's action sends an equally chilling signal
not just for current workers, who now have lost their
retirement security, but to the future generation of
workers who are penalized before they ever start their
first job.
In the United States, increasingly,
workers are required to bear the costs and the risks for
their retirement and health care security. But they're
also forced to pay the costs for the bad business
decisions that push companies into bankruptcy, like
United Airlines and Delphi, not to mention the misdeeds
of corporate lawbreakers whose actions have wiped out
401 (k) retirement savings at companies like Enron,
WorldCom, and others.
Curiously, the retirement
packages of most top executives remain untouched, as
we've seen at United and scores of other companies. It's
not yet clear that the IBM change affects the executive
supplemental retirement plan at all.
Meanwhile,
as defined benefit pensions go by the wayside, we have a
White House that wants to kick away another pillar of
retirement security by radically changing Social
Security from a guaranteed social insurance program to a
risky Wall Street-based scheme.
If Congress is
interested in real pension reform, it will begin by
encouraging the establishment of defined benefit pension
plans that provide true retirement security for working
families.
This downhill sled ride for U.S.
workers will continue until the United States joins the
mainstream of global democracies and ends the attack on
workplace democracy and workers' rights. When IBM makes
this kind of announcement in Europe, and now much of
South America and Asia, it must negotiate with
employees. Contrast that to the United States, where IBM
employees have no bargaining rights and therefore no
voice. CWA encourages our thousands of members at
Alliance@IBM to speak out to elected officials at every
level of government.
###
More than 6,000 IBM
employees are members and associate members of CWA Local
1701, Alliance@IBM, an association that fights for
workplace, benefit and bargaining rights for IBM
workers.
