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Pension Concerns? Five Ways you Can Take Action
By Daniel Gross, AARP Bulletin
March 2006
1 Organize:
Employees and retirees at companies have organized to make their voices heard. Check out, for example: Verizon Retirement Watch, Bell Telephone Retirees and Alliance@IBM. The Pension Rights Center and the National Retirees Legislative Network help support such groups.
2 Express yourself:
"If an employee values the plan, and it's part of the reason they're with the employer, they need to let them know that," says Don Fuerst of Mercer Human Resource Consulting. "A lot of employers have the impression that people don't appreciate or understand these plans.”
3 Get in touch:
AARP supports pension legislation that protects older workers from changes that would reduce their promised benefits when employers convert to a cash-balance plan. To contact your members of Congress to urge them to adopt the Senate protections for cash balance conversions in S 1783, go to AARP's website and click on "E-mail Your Members of Congress." Or you can call AARP's Pension Protection hot line—(800) 580-5739. "Employees should write letters to Congress urging them to stop healthy companies from freezing plans and breaking pension promises to older employees," says Karen Friedman of the Pension Rights Center.
4 Stay informed:
Check the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. website to find out the status of your plan and to learn what protections are available if your company does go bankrupt.
5 Take control:
In today's environment, employees have to recognize that pensions are essentially optional and that companies can freeze them at will. By opening supplemental savings accounts or maxing out self-directed vehicles like IRAs or 401(k)s, employees can mitigate some of the ill effects of pension losses. "It's very healthy for employees to look at their overall retirement goals in total, and try to take control of that as much as they can," says Ari Jacobs of Hewitt Associates, a human resources consulting firm.
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