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I don’t have any insight into the history of this plan. A lot of multi-employer pension plans are badly underfunded, especially in declining industries. The plans were designed so that workers and employers would keep putting money in and the plan would be sustainable over long periods of time. I used to help a multi-employer pension plan in Canada with their long term planning - it was a multi-employer plan covering newspapers. What does the future status of your pension plan look like when you have a dependency on a vibrant future workforce of newspaper employees to make contributions?
One of the reasons that social security plans are easier to make sustainable is that they rely on contributions from the entire national workforce. That’s a much safer bet than any one industry.
$36 billion to bail out this pension will get a lot of angry ranting from conservative types, but it’s probably good policy. No one is starting these kinds of plans up anymore so there’s not a lot of moral hazard risks. The plans that do exist now and are underfunded are taking a ton of risk anyway - there’s really no other way for them to climb out of deficits than to bet on risky investments that might grow faster than liabilities.
Aside from these badly funded private sector multi-employer plans, the real elephant in the room is the approximately trillion dollar deficit in US public sector pension plans at the state and local level.
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Sure, a few good things. But the bar for this is on the goddamn floor.
He could be A LOT better.
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Doesn’t change the fact that he broke a fucken rail strike.
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Hey at least he he didn’t send in the Army to take over the railroads. What a guy
Bailouts for working class workers are better than the alternative, give him credit there
meme stocks are a trip. saw a reddit post last night, was basically “hear me out on WE…”
figured it was fucking 15 cents a share (and bankrupt!), what could go wrong?
basically doubled in 5 hours 
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wait 170k/year damn I gotta learn to drive truck outside of playing truck simulator
there’s a bunch of people who went and finished college and aren’t making that, that was a huge mistake. lol those suckers, oh right that’s me.
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The idea of pensions that people could withdraw an absolute shit ton more than they put in and it’d be sustainable, well it’s not but the can keeps getting kicked down the road somehow. Guess they figured they’d be dead by then so lol who cares.
Because truck drivers are actually essential, most of us are not (including myself)
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A few months ago I snapped back at a young therapist on a message board when she was whining about being in a profession that led to student loans and then earning less per hour than her trucker patient.
She didn’t like it when I basically called her entitled and classist. 
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I feel seen on this comment, because I definitely had that complaint when I was a resident.
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Doctors are essential too!
This is true of every financial savings vehicle from your bank account to US Social Security. If the amounts in PLUS interest / investments gains MINUS amounts out don’t balance then the plan fails. This is not a risk unique to pension plans.
Anyway, the magic of pension plans isn’t that they are a way to invest money so that you can take more out later than you put in now. That is true of all financial savings vehicles. The magic of pension plans is that they pool longevity risk so you can have a higher income in retirement than if you have to manage your longevity risk as an individual. A large group of retiring 65 year olds might have an average life expectancy at retirement of something about 22 years and a tiny standard deviation in the average of the group. A single retiring 65 year old might have a life expectancy of 22 years and a standard deviation of 8 years.
That uncertainty in individual life expectancies has a big cost. A person that is sitting on a pool of money at retirement and wants to be 95% sure that it will last until they die can only take out a much small amount than someone that has accumulated the same money in a pension plan with other people. Here’s an example:
Suppose Clovis is a 65 retiree in Alberta and is owed $1 per year from life from the Swingers Pension Plan. The SPP is a regulated pension plan and subject to all the corresponding funding and solvency requirements. The probability of failure is low - we might conservatively say that he is 95% likely to receive every pension payment he is owed.
His life expectancy is roughly 23 - should he trade his pension for an amount that, even invested in a guaranteed investment vehicle with a yield of 5%, will provide for $1 per year for 23 years? Not if he is depending on that income. If he wants to be very confident that he would get his $1 per year for life, he would actually need to plan for at least 30 payments. Even if he conservatively tries to stretch his dollars to cover himself to age 95, he still has over a 20% chance of living even longer than that and running out of money. This is a bad deal for Clovis - he would need to take something like 88 cents per year to try to make his money last to 95, and then 1/5 of the time he’d run out of money anyway.
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i mean that 170k figure is a little misleading because that is the total compensation figure that is expected five years out from now. so a white collar worker making $100k now probably has a total compensation of closer to $140k most people just think in terms of their annual salary and not total compensation, and in five years from now that workers total comp will probably be closer to $170k, and from my understanding UPS workers work a shitton of hours in horrible conditions (6 days per week, 115 degree heat in the summer, negative temps in the winter) so i would probably not trade places with them for any amount of money.
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Although pay for a full time driver is $49 an hour right now. That’s 100k for straight eights. With five hours a week of overtime that’s $117k.
Lots of college grads are working more than 40 hours a week and Saturdays and not making anything close to that.
So what if many college grads aren’t earning as much as UPS drivers? I assume that UPS drivers work harder and are in greater demand than a wide swath of college grads.
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I never said it was bad and I don’t see how you could take my post that way.
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most college grads spend their first part of their career learning new skills and wont hit their peak (inflation adjusted) earnings until their 40s, not exactly a fair comparison to UPS drivers who arent learning new skills and are basically just trading their bodies/backs for money.
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heres a good post from reddit, the 170k number gets them from 41/hr to 49/hr which barely keeps up with inflation. no A/C in the trucks, 130 degrees in the cargo area, and work until 830 or later. no thank you
I’m a ups driver.
- We don’t make 170K. That was a PR stunt by corporate so that if we vote down the tentative contract we look like greedy assholes. That figure was pulled out of their asses and includes $7.50/hour in raises over the next 5 years which won’t even keep up with inflation (raise the rates more please daddy JPow), our overtime and the projected cost of our benefits in 5 years.
- We currently do okay at just over $41 per hour. If we didn’t work overtime thats $85K per year.
- The job isn’t as easy as it looks. We’re not just driving around in short shorts banging your wives while you’re at work. (We leave that up to your wife’s boyfriend, at least until your puts print and he lets you move back into the house instead of sleeping in the tool shed). The back of the truck this time of year is over 130 degrees in NYC and over 150 in places like Texas and Florida. NO we don’t have AC. Starting in 2024 the company claims they’re putting ac in new trucks however we still have a surplus of trucks just sitting around from the covid surge. Also, when those make-believe trucks finally are ordered, they will be sent down south and no one else will see them. Those who do get the pretend trucks with ac, are not allowed to idle the trucks at all and the doors are constantly opening anyway so AC in the cab is pointless. Also the AC will only be in the cab so the cargo area will continue to be 130°. We work in the freezing rain, crazy heat, a foot of snow, pouring rain and many of us don’t get home until 8:30pm or later. We have to pick up and deliver packages weighing up to 150 lb with no help. The trucks are often piled with random boxes not only on the shelves but clogging up the aisles all the way up to the ceiling and it usually looks like it was loaded by a blind man using a snowblower. Everything in the truck is all wired up and they micromanage us over every little thing. They know when the door is open, how much the truck idled at traffic lights, how many times we back up, how fast we were going when we were backing up, how far we backed etc. Management legit follows us around in unmarked cars or hiding behind bushes trying to find something that we aren’t doing properly.
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