My sis found this on FB: "Now that the Dow is at an all time high ...

[dkf]

69. If you think the market has no effect on a pension you are grossly deceived.

The market enables full payment of a pension.

Here:

Although Congress waived compliance with new pension rules this year, the law will eventually take effect, and will force employers to cover these pension gaps. Rather than clean up their act, more and more employers are looking for the exit. By April of this year nearly a third of America’s largest companies had frozen their pension plans.

Many others are invoking the nuclear option, declaring bankruptcy as a way to unload their pension plans on the taxpayers. Unfortunately, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), established in 1975 to backstop private sector pensions, is already reeling from a decade of high-profile and expensive pension defaults at companies like United Airlines and steelmaker LTV.

Nine of the 10 largest pension defaults in history occurred since 2000, leaving the PBGC with a deficit of $11 billion at the end of 2008. That gap could swell to more than $100 billion over the next few years, amounting to a backdoor bailout for big corporations, and a bitter pill for abandoned retirees.

Workers at Republic Steel saw first hand how it works when they had their pensions cut by $1,000 a month in 2002 by the PBGC and then cut again in 2004. Five workers from the Lorain, Ohio, plant committed suicide after the first time their pension was diminished. In the second round of cuts, retirees like Bruce Bostick, former grievance chair for USW Local 1104, saw their retirements fall from $1,047 a month to $125.

The situation for public sector workers isn’t much better. Although 80 percent of public employees have traditional pensions, those benefits are now in the cross-hairs of conservative and liberal politicians. Two-thirds of public sector pension plans are underfunded—to the tune of $430 billion—and state and local budget crises are pitting taxpayers against public employees from California to Maine.

http://www.labornotes.org/2009/09/pensions-next-casualty-wall-street