Possible Impediment to Pension Improvements
Friday, March 28th, 2008I've had a couple of comments regarding Frank Munger's blog articles (which you can easily accrss by scrolling down the right side of this page).
This past Tuesday, Frank published a chart of new hires at Y-12. A couple of weeks ago, he published the same type chart for new hires at ORNL. A CORRE member noted that ORNL has hired over 2000 new employees since 2001 and Y-12 has hired over 2500 new employees since the year 2000. Perhaps not all these are full-time and perhaps not all are eligible for a pension (though I don't know why they wouldn't). But one could reasonably assume that well more than half, say 2500 to 3000, have come to work expecting to have a pension when they retire.
Is it possible that DOE and its contractors realize that without the pension fund surplus they would need to immediately begin contributing to the pension fund to account for these new employees? Or is it possible they are thinking the pension fund surplus will take care of these people as long as they don't use part of the surplus to improve the pensions of current retirees.
What do you think?
