How Companies Plunder and Profit from the Nest
Eggs of American Workers 

By Ellen Schultz, Portfolio Books 

http://www.alternet.org/story/152549/

The following is an excerpt from Retirement Heist: How
Companies Plunder and Profit From the Nest Eggs of
Americans Workers, by Ellen E. Schultz by arrangement
with Portfolio, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc.,
Copyright (c) Ellen E. Schultz, 2011.

In December 2010, General Electric held its Annual
Outlook Investor Meeting at Rockefeller Center in New
York City. At the meeting, chief executive Jeffrey
Immelt stood on the Saturday Night Live stage and gave
the gathered analysts and shareholders a rundown on the
global conglomerate's health. But in contrast to the
iconic comedy show that is filmed at Rock Center each
week, Immelt's tone was solemn. Like many other CEOs at
large companies, Immelt pointed out that his firm's
pension plan was an ongoing problem. The "pension has
been a drag for a decade," he said, and it would cause
the company to lose 13 cents per share the next year.
Regretfully, to rein in costs, GE was going to close
the pension plan to new employees.

The audience had every reason to believe him. An
escalating chorus of bloggers, pundits, talk show
hosts, and media stories bemoan the burgeoning
pension-and-retirement crisis in America, and GE was
just the latest of hundreds of companies, from IBM to
Verizon, that have slashed pensions and medical
benefits for millions of American retirees. To justify
these cuts, companies complain they're victims of a
"perfect storm" of uncontrollable economic forces--an
aging workforce, entitled retirees, a stock market
debacle, and an outmoded pension system that cripples
their chances of competing against pensionless
competitors and companies overseas.

What Immelt didn't mention was that, far from being a
burden, GE's pension and retiree plans had contributed
billions of dollars to the company's bottom line over
the past decade and a half, and were responsible for a
chunk of the earnings that the executives had taken
credit for. Nor were these retirement programs--even
with GE's 230,000 retirees--bleeding the company of
cash. In fact, GE hadn't contributed a cent to the
workers' pension plans since 1987 but still had enough
money to cover all the current and future retirees.

And yet, despite all this, Immelt's assessment wasn't
entirely inaccurate. The company did indeed have
another pension plan that really was a burden: the one
for GE executives. And unlike the pension plans for a
quarter of a million workers and retirees, the
executive pensions, with a $4.4 billion obligation,
have always been a drag on earnings and have always
drained cash from company coffers: more than $573
million over the past three years alone.

So a question remains: With its fully funded pension
plan, why was GE closing its pensions?

That is one of the questions this book seeks to answer.
Retirement Heist explains what really happened to GE's
pensions as well as to the retirement benefits of
millions of Americans at thousands of companies. No one
disputes that there's a retirement crisis, but the
crisis was no demographic accident. It was manufactured
by an alliance of two groups: top executives and their
facilitators in the retirement industry--benefits
consultants, insurance companies, and banks--all of whom
played a huge and hidden role in the death spiral of
American pensions and benefits.

Yet, unlike the banking industry, which was rightly
blamed for the subprime mortgage crisis, the
masterminds responsible for the retirement crisis have
walked away blame-free. And, unlike the pension raiders
of the 1980s, who killed pensions to extract the
surplus assets, they face no censure. If anything they
are viewed as beleaguered captains valiantly trying to
keep their overloaded ships from being sunk in a
perfect storm. In reality, they're the silent pirates
who looted the ships and left them to sink, along with
the retirees, as they sailed away safely in their
lifeboats.

The roots of this crisis took hold two decades ago,
when corporate pension plans, by and large, were well
funded, thanks in large part to rules enacted in the
1970s that required employers to fund the plans
adequately and laws adopted in the 1980s that made it
tougher for companies to raid the plans or use the
assets for their own benefit. Thanks to these rules,
and to the long-running bull market that pumped up
assets, by the end of the 1990s pension plans at many
large companies had such massive surpluses that the
companies could have fully paid their current and
future retirees' pensions, even if all of them lived to
be 99 and the companies never contributed another dime.

But despite the rules protecting pension funds, U.S.
companies siphoned billions of dollars in assets from
their pension plans. Many, like Verizon, used the
assets to finance downsizings, offering departing
employees additional pension payouts in lieu of cash
severance. Others, like GE, sold pension surpluses in
restructuring deals, indirectly converting pension
assets into cash.

To replenish the surplus assets in their pension piggy
banks, companies cut benefits. Initially, employees
didn't question why companies with multi-billion-dollar
pension surpluses were cutting pensions that weren't
costing them anything, because no one noticed their
pensions were being cut. Employers used actuarial
sleight of hand to disguise the cuts, typically by
changing the traditional pensions to seemingly simple
account-style plans.

Cutting benefits provided a secondary windfall: It
boosted earnings, thanks to new accounting rules that
required employers to put their pension obligations on
their books. Cutting pensions reduced the obligations,
which generated gains that are added to income. These
accounting rules are the Rosetta Stone that explains
why companies with massively overfunded pension plans
went on a pension-cutting spree and began slashing
retiree health benefits even when their costs were
falling. By giving companies an incentive to reduce the
liability on their books, the accounting rules turned
retiree benefits plans into cookie jars of potential
earnings enhancements and provided employers with the
means to convert the trillion dollars in pensions and
retiree benefits into an immediate, dollar-for-dollar
benefit for the company.

With perfectly legal loopholes that enabled companies
to tap pension plans like piggy banks, and accounting
rules that rewarded employers for cutting benefits,
retiree benefits plans soon morphed into profit
centers, and populations of retirees essentially became
portfolios of assets and debts, which passed from
company to company in swirls of mergers, spin-offs and
acquisitions. And with each of these restructuring
deals, the subsequent owner aimed to squeeze a profit
from the portfolio, always at the expense of the
retirees.

The flexibility in the accounting rules, which gave
employers enormous latitude to raise or lower their
obligations by billions of dollars, also turned retiree
plans into handy earnings-management tools.

Unfortunately for employees and retirees, these
newfound tricks coincided with the trend of tying
executive pay to performance. Thus, deliberately or
not, the executives who green-lighted massive retiree
cuts were indirectly boosting their own pay.

As their pay grew, managers and officers began
diverting growing amounts into deferred-compensation
plans, which are unfunded and therefore create a
liability. Meanwhile, their supplemental executive
pensions, which are based on pay, ballooned along with
their compensation. Today, it's common for a large
company to owe its executives several billion dollars
in pensions and deferred compensation.

These growing "executive legacy liabilities" are
included in the pension obligations employers report to
shareholders, and account for many of the "growing
pension costs" companies are complaining about.
Analysts, shareholders, and others don't understand
that executive obligations are no different from
pension obligations for rank-and-file workers and
retirees--they are governed by the same accounting
rules, and they represent IOUs that a company has on
its books. In some ways, executive liabilities are like
public pensions: large, growing, and underfunded (or,
as in the case of the executives, unfunded).

Unlike regular pensions, the growing executive
liabilities are largely hidden, buried within the
figures for regular pensions. So even as employers
bemoaned their pension burdens, the executive pensions
and deferred comp were becoming in some companies a
bigger drag on profits.

To offset the impact of their growing executive
liabilities on profits, many companies take out
billions of dollars of life insurance on their
employees, using the policies as informal executive
pension funds and collecting death benefits when
workers, former employees, and retirees die.

With the help of well-connected Washington lobbyists
and leading law firms, over the past two decades
employers have steadily used legislation and the courts
to undermine protections under federal law, making it
almost impossible for employees and retirees to
challenge their employers' maneuvers. With no punitive
damages under pension law, employers face little risk
when they unilaterally slash benefits, even when
promised in writing, since they can pay their lawyers
with pension assets and drag out the cases until the
retirees give up or die.

As employers curtail traditional pensions, employees
are increasingly relying on 401(k) plans, which have
already proven to be a failure. Employees save too
little, too late, spend the money before retiring, and
can see their savings erased when the market nosedives.

But 401(k)s have other features that ensure that the
plans, as they exist, will never benefit the majority
of employees. The plans are supposed to provide a level
playing field, the do-it-yourself retirement vehicle so
perfect for an "ownership" society. But the game has
been rigged from the beginning. Many companies use
these plans as part of a strategy to borrow money
cheaply, or in schemes to siphon assets from pension
funds.

And just as the new accounting rules led to such
mischief, so too did new anti-discrimination rules.
Implemented in the 1990s, the rules were intended to
ensure that employers didn't use taxpayer-subsidized
401(k) plans for the favored few, but would make them
available to a broad swath of workers. But thanks to
the creativity of benefits consultants, employers have
used the discrimination rules to shut millions of
low-paid employees out of their plans and to provide
them with less generous benefits, while enacting other
restrictions that make the plans more valuable to
managers and executives, at the expense of everyone
else.

Today, pension plans are collectively underfunded,
hundreds are frozen, and retiree health benefits are an
endangered species. And as executive pay and executive
pensions spiral, these executive liabilities are slowly
replacing pension obligations on many corporate balance
sheets.

Meanwhile, the same crowd that created this
mess--employers, consultants, and financial firms--are
now the primary architects of the "reforms" that will
supposedly clean it up. Under the guise of improving
retirement security, their "solutions" will enable
employers to continue to manipulate retirement plans to
generate profit and enrich executives at the expense of
employees and retirees. Shareholders pay a price, too.

Their tactics haven't served as case studies at Harvard
Business School, and aren't mentioned in the copious
surveys and studies consultants produce for a gullible
public. But the masterminds of this heist should take a
bow: They managed to take hundreds of billions of
dollars in retirement benefits that were intended for
millions of workers and divert them to corporate
coffers, shareholders, and their own pockets. And
they're still at it. It might not be possible to
resuscitate pension plans, but it isn't too late to
expose the machinations of the retirement industry,
which has its tentacles into every type of retirement
benefit: profit-sharing plans, 401(k)s, employee stock
ownership plans (ESOPs), and plans for public
employees, nonprofits, small businesses, and even
churches.

The retirement industry has exported its tactics, using
them to achieve similar outcomes in retirement plans in
Canada, Europe, Australia, and elsewhere, and has big
plans for Social Security and its overseas equivalents
as well. Unless it is reined in, the global retirement
industry will continue to capture retirement wealth
earned by many to enrich a relative few.

Ellen Schultz, an investigative reporter for the Wall
Street Journal, has covered the retirement crisis for
over a decade. (c) 2011 Portfolio Books All rights
reserved. View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/152549/

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