Originally Posted by Idaho

I would believe that the pension has onerous cost to the company. If the market tanks, who wants to be responsible for making fixed payments? On the other hand, it sounds like many of us are dying at increasingly young ages due to immunity issues, cardiac events, complications of the latest flu and its cure. Life expectancy has gone down as any insurance company can tell you. I have little control over retirement, pension debasement, mob rule in our contract vote, and then there is the 401k where I can gamble in the rigged stock market, and the government can change the rules at any time on the tax, distribution, investments allowed, and contribution. The pension is leverage, if we give it up for an hourly rate increase we'll be back in the same boat, albeit 9 years later based on current precedent.