[BREAK] This "pensions hurt us all" story has been the corporate media story du jour for months now. It's as if the retired/retiring workers suddenly grabbed guns and robbed the cash from the company. The headline, "Cost of Pensions Adds to Factory Town’s Troubles", sure makes "pensions" the bad guy. Of course, they usually fail to mention the fact that the workers could have taken the pension funds as pay/cash in their contracts, but chose to allow the company to invest that portion of the money the employees could have taken as salary after collective bargaining. They chose to allow that money to be a form of forced retirement savings . . . not knowing that when it came time to collect they'd suddenly be made to beg, negotiate again or just be denied the pension. In many of these sleight-of-hand corporate bankruptcies, the retirees lose much, if not all, of what had been promised/offered to them in return for their labor. Keep in mind, it was their money! It is not some gift that the corporation grants the retiree, out of the magnanimous generosity of the corporate board. But let's look at another huge cost facing society today. When was the last time you saw a headline like "Huge tax breaks given by [local/state/Federal] government[s] to large corporations are causing cut backs in government services." Can't remember? Neither can I! And, with the corporate media we have today, you're not likely to see many of those. But those tax breaks/gifts hurt us all, just the same. ===== [/BREAK]

Cost of Pensions Adds to Factory Town’s Troubles - New York Times LOCKPORT, N.Y. — For two and a half years, Michael Tucker was mayor of this small city by day and an autoworker by night. Then in May, he became one of the nearly 50,000 workers at General Motors or its former Delphi parts division to take buyouts, lured by the $33,000-a-year pension his company offered. That pension, and a smaller one he expects to collect from the state after his years as mayor, makes him a little unusual in a nation where more and more workers are not covered by such plans. But now, as mayor of Lockport, Mr. Tucker, 49, is seeing the budget of this city north of Buffalo consumed by the kind of pension and retiree health care costs that helped push Delphi into bankruptcy. So he is preparing to do what his former employers, G.M. and Delphi, have already begun to do: ask the city’s five unions for concessions, including limiting wage increases and cutting benefits, when labor contracts expire next year.

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