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Posted by John Mellon: AARP Bulletin  1st Qtr 2003
TREASURY'S PROPOSED RULE COULD PAVE WAY FOR CONTORVERSIAL PLANS
Posted by John Mellon: "BAD NEWS FOR WORKERS"
By Trish Nicholson.

Millions of midlife workers vested in corporate pension plans could
find their retirement income
diminished if a proposed shift in federal policy goes through.
New rules proposed by the U.S. Treasury Department would give a green
light to companies that
want to convert their traditional pension plans into so-called "cash
balance" plans. Unless
strong opposition emerges, the rule change could be effective as
early as April.
"That would be bad news for mid-or late-career workers," says Karen
Friedman, an official with
the Pension Rights Center, a nonprofit advocacy group in Washington.
She points out that when employers switch to such plans, older
workers often see their expected
retirement benefits shrivel dramatically-sometimes by as much as 50%.
Treasury Department officials sponsoring the rule change disagree.
They say the switch from
traditional to cash balance pensions can be done I a way that's fair
to all age groups.
LONGEVITY VS JOB HOPPING
Controversial as cash balance plans may be, they resemble traditional
pensions in important ways.
They are both funded and managed by employers, requiring no
investment decisions by employees.

But benefits accrue differently under the two types of plans.
Traditional plans provide less in
the early years but reward longevity with a big spike in benefits
near the end of long-term
workers' careers.
"JUST AS THE WORKER COMES CLOSE TO GETTING THE GOLDEN RING, THE RULES
OF THE GAME ARE CHANGED."

Cash balance plans are more generous to workers who stay for the
required vesting period (usually
five years) but not their entire careers. Job hoppers can roll their
assets into an IRA or
another employer's plan when changing jobs.
Cash balance plans provide more modest benefits than traditional
plans but at a steadier rate of
growth. They take away the spike.
If implemented abruptly, such a change can undermine the planning of
those nearing retirement.
"(just as) the worker comes close to getting the golden ring, the
rules of the game are changed,"
observes Gary Burtless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution,
a nonpartisan think tank in
Washington. "Yep, and it is a very bitter experience."
So bitter that thousands of midlife workers protested in the late
1990s when companies such as
IBM, Bell Atlantic (now Verison) and AT&T started replacing their
traditional pensions with cash
balance plans. Employees at those and other companies filed class
action lawsuits against their
employers charging age discrimination.

A few firms, such as IBM, later revised their plans to give some
older workers the option of
switching to the cash balance plan or remaining in the traditional
plan.

PROBING AGE DISCRIMINATION
But protests continued. Hundreds of workers facing reduced pensions
charged age bias in
complaints filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
During the Clinton
administration, the Internal Revenue Service quit approving cash
balance plans to look into
charges that such plans violated federal laws, including the law
barring age discrimination inn
employment. Should the Treasury's new rules become final, the
moratorium will end.
The change is overdue, says James Klein, president of the Washington-
based American Benefits
Council, which represents employers. "Companies that have established
(cash balance) plans should
be applauded, not criticized," he says, for funding a kind of
plan "that makes sense for the
realities of (today's mobile) work force.

One reason employers may prefer cash balance plans is that they cost
less than traditional plans.
The switch may be especially appealing now, because in this economy
some companies with
traditional plans are having a hard time keeping them sufficiently
funded to meet long-term
obligations.
"We don't have the authority to stop companies from amending their
plans," William F. Sweetnam
Jr., benefits tax counsel at the Treasury, tells the AARP
Bulletin. "What we say is, if you do
amend your plan, you have to do it in a way that is fair to all
employees." He says the new rules
instruct employers to follow certain age-neutral guidelines.
But the proposed regulations are flawed, contends David Certner, AARP
director of federal
affairs. "They don't go far enough toward protecting older workers
who made career decisions
years ago based on the promise of certain retirement benefits in
later life." (See page 27)
What's more, adds pension advocate Friedman, the rule change could
open the floodgates to firms
switching to cash balance plans.
"Our fear," she says, "is if these proposed regulations go through,
there could be a stampede of
companies doing these conversions in a way that effectively robs
older workers of benefits."


THE RISKS OF CONVERSION

How a long-term employee can be disadvantaged by a cash balance
conversion is illustrated by the
case of Kathi Cooper, 52, the lead plaintiff in the 1999 IBM suit.
Cooper, an accountant at IBM
for 24 years, claims to have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in
retirement income due to
its pension conversion.
Cooper attributes a large part of her loss to something called "wear
away," an aspect of cash
balance conversions that experts say the proposed rules would not
prohibit.
"Wear away" is a process-that sometimes lasting years-during an older
worker caught in a cash
balance conversion accrues no new pension credits while the worker's
balance in the new plan
catches up with what he or she already earned in the old. That wear
away process, critics say,
can erode a worker's expected pension dramatically.

The new rules aren't final yet. That won't happen until a public
comment period ends and a public
hearing takes place. (See box below)
But it may be an uphill battle to persuade the Treasury to change the
rules to help older
workers, says Ron Gebhardtsbauer, senior pension fellow at the
American Academy of Actuaries.
Federal pension laws protect benefits earned to date but not
projected benefits, he says, nor
workers' expectations.

GETTING CONGRESS TO ACT
Congress could strengthen pension laws to provide "a soft landing for
older workers" in cash
balance conversions, says J. Mark Iwry, who served as the benefits
tax counsel at the Treasury
Department from 1995 to 2001.
Some companies, such as Kodak, have voluntarily mitigated adverse
effects for older workers by
giving them a choice between the old and new plans. Other companies,
such as IBM and Wells Fargo,
have grandfathered some older workers into the traditional plan,
depending on their age and
length of service.
Congress could require companies to provide older workers with
various options, Iwry suggests.
Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and Rep. Bernard Sanders, I-Vt., have vowed
to push bills that would
require firms converting to cash balance plans to give workers vested
in the company's
traditional plan a choice between staying in the old plan or
switching to the new one.

POINT AND COUNTERPOINT
Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota introduced a bill
including such a provision
(S.9) in January. But strong opposition is expected from employers.
Much is at stake, pension advocates say. "The trend is apparent,"
says AARP legislative
representative Frank Toohey. "Firms starting new plans are going to
choose cash balance, and
companies will continue to shift from traditional to cash balance
plans. Our primary concern," he
says, "is to protect older workers as their firms make the switch."
Express Your Views The deadline to comment on the proposed rules is
March 13. A public hearing is
set for April 9 at the internal Revenue Service in Washington.
To weigh in, write to: CC:ITA:RU (REG-209500-86), Room 5226, IRS,
P.O. Box 7604, Ben Franklin
Station, Washington, DE 20044.

Go to: http://www.angelfire.com/theforce/ibmdiscriminates/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/IBMDISCRIMINATES/

Last 5 Visitor Comments:

1. John, now that you have got the wacko hacker out of our hair, we
can start posting the true results of the ibmdiscriminates poll on the
site. Sorry little fellow but when you are mentally sick, you are
seriously sick. He does need treatment for his anger. Linda G
2. John, good decision to lighten your load with our cases against
IBM. We agree that your refocusing your time and energies to the main
mission at hand is paramount. Having the conference calls twice per
week & for a full 1-2 hours allows all of us the time to recap our
progress & set the agenda for the following weeks. Keep up the good
leadership. Again thanks for all of your hard work from the core team.
Jerry & Sarah
3. EEOC The Unites States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission:
1-800-669-4000 The Price of Top-Down Management The American Lawyer
=96
by Nathan Koppel (12/2/02) - Does top-down management have a new
downside? The battle between Chicago's Sidley Austin Brown & Wood and
the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission may provide an
answer. The EEOC is investigating Sidley for age discrimination in its
1999 demotion of 32 partners, the majority of whom were older than 50
["Seniority Complex," June 2000]. Sidley denies that age was a factor
in the demotions, and it claims the EEOC can't investigate its
partners because they are "employers" -- federal antidiscrimination
laws protect only "employees," the notion being that employers call
the shots and don't need protection. So far Sidley is losing the
employer/employee name game, which means that EEOC v. Sidley could
pave the way for law firms to face more age, race, and sex
discrimination claims. On October 24 Judge Richard Posner of the 7th
U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a biting opinion in the case that
questioned whether Sidley partners have enough authority to be deemed
employers. Sidley's executive committee, not its rank-and-file
partners, wrote Posner, holds most of the power at the firm. For
procedural reasons, the judge, writing for a 3-to-0 panel, didn't
ultimately decide whether Sidley partners are employers or employees.
Sidley must first produce additional evidence, he wrote, before the
partners' legal status can be resolved. But Posner's opinion is still
problematic, because it rebuts the notion, widely held among law
firms, that partners are automatically beyond the EEOC's reach.
Instead, it depends on the facts of each case, says Posner. "The
lesson for firms in this case is that you can't get away with anything
you want just by calling someone a partner," says James Burns, Jr., an
employment partner at Chicago's Katten Muchin Zavis Rosenman. "I think
it is a very troublesome decision," adds Allen Fagin, co-chair of
labor and employment at New York's Proskauer Rose. He says that
Posner's case-by-case approach to deciding whether a partner is, in
fact, an employer offers law firms little guidance about their
potential liability. Fagin is further troubled that Posner saw
Sidley's executive committee as evidence that its partners might be
entitled to federal protection. "The trend in large firms is to
concentrate day-to-day decision authority in a relatively small
executive committee and/or firm chair," says Fagin. Posner's opinion
presages a lucrative class of new plaintiffs. "In professional service
firms, you have a huge bulge of baby boomer partners making hundreds
of thousands [of dollars] who may be protected by civil rights laws,"
says Michael Maslanka, chair of labor and employment at Dallas' Godwin
Gruber. "Plaintiffs' lawyers will have a feast on [Posner's opinion].
It's like ringing the dinner bell." The investigation of Sidley took a
serious turn in 2001, when the EEOC issued a subpoena requesting that
Sidley produce all documents pertaining to its decision to demote the
32 partners. Sidley complied only in part, producing information that
demonstrated, in the firm's view, that the demoted partners were true
partners and thus beyond the reach of the federal Age Discrimination
in Employment Act. Sidley, for example, revealed to the EEOC that the
demoted partners all shared in firm profits and firm liabilities and
also contributed capital to the firm. "No case in history has ever
applied the ADEA to an equity partner in a bona fide law firm,"
asserted Sidley in a pleading filed this year in the case. In
February, U.S. District Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow of Chicago ordered
Sidley to comply in full with the EEOC's subpoena. On appeal, Posner
also rejected Sidley's attempt to halt the EEOC in its tracks. He
conceded that the demoted Sidley partners were true partners. But that
alone, he ruled, didn't mean that they were employers. Posner focused
on Sidley's management structure, which vests considerable authority
in a self-perpetuating executive committee. The committee, wrote
Posner, "can fire [Sidley partners], promote them, demote them (as it
did to the 32), raise their pay, lower their pay, and so forth. The
only firmwide issue on which all partners have voted in the last
quarter-century was the [2001] merger with Brown & Wood, and that vote
took place after the EEOC began its investigation." Though Posner
seemed to view the demoted Sidley partners as largely powerless, he
stopped short of ruling on their legal standing. He ordered Sidley to
produce additional documents -- including such private information as
Sidley's method of distributing profits on a firmwide basis -- to aid
the EEOC in deciding whether Sidley partners are covered by the ADEA.
If the EEOC decides the partners are covered, Sidley will have a
chance to contest that in court. Posner did throw Sidley one bone: He
ruled that it doesn't have to hand over information about its
demotions until the employer/employee issue is resolved. Sidley seized
on that point to claim victory. "The bottom line is that the
bifurcation approach [of first resolving whether partners are
employers before addressing whether the firm violated the ADEA] has
been accepted, and we are pleased with that," says Sidley's lawyer,
Paul Grossman, an employment partner in the Los Angeles office of
Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker. The EEOC is also pleased. John
Hendrickson, the lead EEOC lawyer, says that Posner's opinion is
perfectly in tune with the modern megafirm, where partners don't
necessarily have management authority or control over their employment
status. "Posner clearly says ... let's not get hung up on [partner]
labels, let's look at what is really going on here," says Hendrickson.
Of course, Posner's isn't the final word. In his concurrence with the
Seventh Circuit panel opinion, Judge Frank Easterbrook agreed that the
EEOC could proceed with limited discovery, but he would equate equity
partnership with employer status -- regardless of Sidley's top-down
management structure. And Posner is not the first judge to advocate a
nuanced, case-by-case approach to deciding whether partners are
employers or employees. But, given Posner's stature, Sidley and the
EEOC will have many lawyers looking over their shoulders as they
explore the nuances.
4. Fighting Age Discrimination Corporate "fit" - the match of an
individual's personality with the corporate culture - is an important
factor to success in a corporate career. It is also very squishy. I
have talked about age discrimination before. Hiring managers and HR
people are doing their organizations a great disservice if they expect
to only hire professionals under 40. At the risk of generalizing, I
find that often the older a professional is, the more loyal to the
employer he or she is willing to be. I cannot give you the ultimate
weapon for fighting age discrimination, but I can give you some
particular strategies for nipping the problem in the bud. De-emphasize
age - emphasize experience. As an older worker, you could contribute
many skills to a potential employer. The trick is to ask questions.
Study the job description before the interview for a start. Relate
your experience to the specific job description's needs and
requirements. Then, prepare questions to further probe for additional
needs and requirements. You should only talk about the experience that
you have that directly relates to their needs. There is no need to go
into any historical detail on previous technologies that led to where
we are today. That is irrelevant and can be a turn off. Appear
manageable. Some older workers can give the impression of being a
management problem. Some younger managers might feel intimidated by
your experience. They might feel that you would resent them for being
younger than you. Address these concerns in a positive way even if
they are not expressed directly, because they probably won't be
verbalized. Display a positive attitude about being part of the team
and working with all members of the team, especially the hiring
manger. Appear younger. First impressions count. Paying attention to
appearance and dress can minimize any age discrimination you might
face. Try to be objective about how you come across. You certainly
don't want to dress like a teenager, but you don't want to dress 20
years out of style either. As an extreme, one older IT professional
has a full length beard that makes him appear like Santa Claus. Your
appearance is clearly your personal choice, but realistically it can
have an impact on whether you get the job or not. Use common sense,
and you might want to get an honest outside opinion you can trust.
Retirement/Health concerns. Some hiring managers and companies have
closet fears that health concerns or potential upcoming retirement
could enter the picture with older workers. As soon as possible,
honestly divulge your plans about the rest of your working career.
More than likely, it will be compatible with the employer
expectations, but you need to bring it up. Offer up your work history
and days missed due to injury or illness. The facts speak loud and
clear. Career track. Another unasked question is often the type of
career track that you can expect and that the company can provide.
Talk about this. More than likely, you will find that you can work
something out. Not to say that you still simply won't have a chance at
some companies or with some hiring manager. You wouldn't want to work
for them anyway. Every candidate has to establish his or her own
individual credibility and convince the hiring manager they are right
for the job. The key to overcoming many concerns of hiring managers is
to ask questions and pro-offer answers to questions you know are out
there, whatever your age.
5. United States Code TITLE 29 - LABOR CHAPTER 14 - AGE
DISCRIMINATION IN EMPLOYMENT Section 621. Congressional Statement Of
Findings And Purpose Section 622. Education And Research Program;
Recommendation To Congress Section 623. Prohibition Of Age
Discrimination Section 624. Study By Secretary Of Labor; Reports To
President And Congress; Scope Of Study; Implementation Of Study;
Transmittal Date Of Reports Section 625. Administration Section 626.
Recordkeeping, Investigation, And Enforcement Section 627. Notices To
Be Posted Section 628. Rules And Regulations; Exemptions Section 629.
Criminal Penalties Section 630. Definitions Section 631. Age Limits
Section 632. Omitted Section 633. Federal-State Relationship Section
633a. Nondiscrimination On Account Of Age In Federal Government
Employment Section 634. Authorization Of Appropriations

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The real IBM union
board is not at
ibm_union, it is at:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ibmunion/

The under_scored group
was started by a bunch
of anti-union losers.

You'll notice there are
only 3 message post
total in that group!

Rosie the MBA

Reposted from another Board

There will be an informational meeting in the RTP area, July 25,
5:30 pm, at the Holiday Inn Raleigh-Durham Airport, Executive Board
Room, 4810 Page Road. All employees, retirees are invited to attend.
I will be there, along with Jimmy Tarlau from CWA, to talk about what
the Alliance is all about, and answer any questions. I hope to meet
many of you!
Linda Guyer

MAKE SURE YOU BOOKMARK THEM AS THEY ARE VERY
DIFFICULT TO SEARCH FOR.


   IBM RTP, NC
   http://groups.yahoo.com/group/IBMEMPLOYEEISSUESRTPNC/

   GENERAL EMPLOYEE CHAT BOARD
   http://groups.yahoo.com/search?query=IBMEMPLOYEEISSUES&ss=1

   IBM EMPLOYEE ISSUES
   http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ibmemployeeissues/

   IBM PENSION
   http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ibmpension/

   IBM RETIREE
   http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ibmretiree/

   IBM EMPLOYEES ROCHESTER, MN
   http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ibmpensionrochester/

   IBM EMPLOYEE RIGHTS
   http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ibmcanadaemployeesrights/

   IBM EMPLOYEES BURLINGTON, VT
   http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ibmpensionburlington/

   IBM EMPLOYEE UNION ISSUES
   http://groups.yahoo.com/group/IBM_Union/

   LETTER TO LOU
   http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lettertolou/


   EX-TRIVOLI
   http://groups.yahoo.com/group/extivoli/

   EDC LAYOFF
   http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EDC_layoff/

http://dir.groups.yahoo.com/dir/Business___Finance/Companies/Computers
/Hardware/Systems/IBM/Intra-Company_Groups?show_groups=1

http://dir.groups.yahoo.com/dir/Business___Finance/Companies/Computers
/Hardware/Systems/IBM/Intra-Company_Groups?st=10&show_groups=1

Think about starting your own IBM Employee Board-it's very simple.

Do any RTPer's remember the date the gunman entered the RTP Medical
Center area and shot another Employee? There is a topic in on one of
the other IBM Employee Issue groups about it. Someone is looking to
locate the newspaper article on Micro film and we can't remember the
approx. date. Any help would be appreciated.

Welome to the IBM Employee Issues RTP, NC Group. We welome your
coments.