Losing a pension you’ve worked years to earn is a nightmare scenario, one that can change a comfortable, secure retirement into one filled with worries and penny-pinching as Social Security goes from being part of your retirement income to all of it. For public workers in many places, including firefighters and police in Detroit, it’s …
Even before one of their own was appointed emergency manager of the city, lawyers who were consulting with Michigan officials over the winter believed Detroit should move into bankruptcy proceedings that would free the city to walk away from its commitments to retirees. Emails between Kevyn Orr — now Detroit’s emergency manager but at the time an …
Union members in Swampscott, Mass., this week showed just how grassroots democracy works when a coalition of unions from the North Shore Labor Council mobilized to turn back an attack on public employees’ health care and retirement security. First a little background. In the Bay State, municipal employees’ health and retirement benefits, while negotiated on a local …
Strong Grassroots Actions Block Mass. Pension Scheme Read More »
Money that was intended for employee pensions was used by Hostess Brands management to cover operating expenses and workers were never compensated for the lost payment, Yahoo News reports. An undetermined amount of money that Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Miller (BCTGM) members were supposed to receive as part of their contract with the …
Just When You Thought the Hostess Story Couldn’t Get Worse… Read More »
A total of 84,350 pension plans have vanished since 1985. This figure shocked Pulitzer Prize-winning authors Donald L. Barlett and James W. Steele, who just released their latest book, “The Betrayal of the American Dream.” Their chapter on retirement chronicles the heist of the American dream’s secure retirement by the financial elite and is a …
The huge crowd outside the Verizon Center in downtown Washington, D.C., Saturday wasn’t there for a basketball game or concert. They came to tell Verizon to stop its attack on middle-class jobs. The Verizon Center demonstration and dozens and dozens of other actions at Verizon worksites and Verizon Wireless stores are part of the growing …
Support Grows for Striking Verizon Workers’ Fight for Middle-Class Jobs Read More »
Repeat something often enough and it becomes, if not true, at least a solid bit of conventional wisdom. Consider Ron Lieber’s column in Saturday’s New York Times, which neatly recycles an editorial the Wall Street Journal ran back in March. The issue: the pensions that guarantee public employees a middle-class standard of living in retirement …
More Salvos in the False “Class War” on Public Pensions Read More »
The Hudson Institute, which, as prior unbossed stories have shown, has historically been a shill for the tobacco industry, Monsanto products, and more, is now making a huge push to go after unions . . . Unions and their allies should take this attack seriously. A recent Hudson Institute “study” on pensions, claims (among other …
When the Right Goes After Unions, the Unions Had Better Get Going Read More »
The other day, I saw an amazing spectacle: a firefighter responded to a call to a burning building in New York City and, as he was dragging the fire hose to the fire, a crowd of angry people stopped him and said, “Stop. Your pension is too generous so don’t you dare put that fire …
Madeline Messa is a 3L at Syracuse University College of Law. She graduated from Penn State with a degree in journalism. With her legal research and writing for Workplace Fairness, she strives to equip people with the information they need to be their own best advocate.
