Ellen E. Schultz is a long time reporter for the WSJ who spent many years reporting about how companies plunder and profit from the nest eggs of American workers. She published a book in 2011 detailing the ways IBM and other corporations drained money from pension funds to enrich executives by stealing pension and health benefits from employees. This corporate grift continues even though the pickings are not as lucrative.
If you've never read Ellen Schultz's book (I had not), it is "Retirement Heist".
It is not an easy book to read because the schemes used to steal employee and retiree money are complex and convoluted. There are also a lot of complicit grifters in government and judicial system laws. The best reason to read the book is to learn about the unsung heroes who were ordinary employees with an extraordinary determination to proved the grift. The second best reason to read it, is it might help you understand why this latest maneuver by IBM to move you to a Medicare Advantage plan is just the final step in stealing deferred compensation related to your health benefits. IBM must have used up all the ways to steal deferred compensation from pension funds and probably why they are selling off pieces of the fund to Prudential and MetLife and kissing some of us good-bye.
After reading "Retirement Heist", I hope you will join me in filing a complaint with your state department of labor that IBM is stealing your deferred compensation. It will be hard for states attorney generals to ignore thousands of complaints and maybe even put the state and federal government on the right side of protecting workers. It's a big maybe. An ERISA lawyer recently told me he sometimes had more success filing complaints for his clients than litigating cases.
Wishes for a 2023 full of good health and successful activism.
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