Screwing working people

(now posted at Counterpunch)

A friend of mine dropped out of high school in the mid-70s. She went to work cleaning at a college in her town. She worked at this college for about 30 years.

Apparently, she didn't work for the college, though. She worked for three or four (it's hard to tell) different companies, companies contracted to do the cleaning. 

Now she is ready to get her pension. She went to human resources at the college. But they said she didn't work for them. They sent her to the company currently responsible for housekeeping. That company sent her to the company that manages the union's pension fund.

The union told her to fill out a form. It seemed to her like they wanted her to say that she worked at the college for fourteen years. That's all they had on record. Apparently, some time (when?) the union's pension fund was in trouble so it merged into another pension fund. All the records from the early time were transferred to the new fund managers.

The new fund managers seem to be saying that they have records for my friend's years of work and that they don't have records for her years of work. They also seem to be saying that she needs to go to the social security office to get a bunch of detailed records of her hours. This will cost $47.50. It's hard to know why this is necessary if they already have records of her work. But maybe they don't. 

Meanwhile, the office managing the fund changed addresses on August 1.

I can't quite get why they were telling my friend that she had to go get all these records. And this is after having spoken this morning to four people at three offices (college, current company, and union fund) two or three times each. 

After two hours, though, something else emerged. It now seems like there was no pension fund until 1991. That is, it appears like the local only established a pension fund for the workers in 1991. And it also looks like the employer's contribution during that period was only five cents an hour. It's strange that no one mentioned this to my friend when she was first attempting to get her pension. It is also strange that it took so many phone calls to establish this. Is it even true? That's not what my friend remembers. She remembers a union being there from the beginning, but it's been a long time and this stuff is complicated and confusing.

On the surface, my friend's experience is that of working in the same place, in the same union, in the same buildings, for nearly 30 years. Below the surface: three (or four) companies, only one of which currently exists and two (or three) pension funds, only one of which currently exists.

Because of capital, her world is not what it seems. Her basic experience of work (which also sucks) is fundamentally different from capital's managing of her remuneration for her work. The effect is that she worked for 30 years and her pension will only cover 14 years. And, it isn't clear why: no union contract? a mismanaged pension fund? a loss of records as ownership changed? The complications benefit capital and screw her. She's being exploited through the mechanisms of a process that was supposed to provide her with a benefit. She doesn't understand a lot of it (and neither do I). But she gets the basic point: "they expect me to die so that they won't have to give me my money."

But this story is incomplete because I've left out or underplayed another key aspect of the situation--how the people who work in offices treat my friend. She's in her sixties, black, and without a high school degree. When she got to my house this morning, she understood the primary issue to be that she needed to get information from social security that would tell the pension fund people how long she had worked for the college (which, technically, was zero years since she was employed by a private contractor). Her concern was with filling out a form properly and needing some white-out to fix some information that was misrepresented. When I made the phone calls, people talked to me, answered my questions, tranferred me to others higher on the food chain, and began doing the research on the employers and union contracts. I'm a 50 year old white woman, a full professor with a Ph.D. I found it all extraordinarily difficult to understand and only began getting things sorted by asking a lot of questions. The bureaucrats only divulged information when asked and spoke as if all of their terms were clear and obvious. They were brusk and confident, off-putting if you aren't privileged enough or socialized to question and push back. After I hung up from the last call, my friend looked at my across the table, shaking her head in a combination of disgust, fury, and resignation, "they wouldn't tell me none of that."

As it looks right now, she will get $70.70 a month. She worked as a cleaner for thirty years.

Comments

[Alain]

Thank you for sharing this Jodi. This is a tragedy. It is absolutely disgusting.

And after reading it I think the experience also demonstrates the frutration one experiences in dealing with any bureaucracy - condescension, irritation and the standard run around. All of this further undermines peoples confidence in our institutions and government in particular. On top of that, your friend may wonder if even her union somehow betrayed her?

It just sucks.

[Crackinhistory.wordpress.com]

A great post, yes. Everything that has to do with the most basic survival takes not only a huge amount of patience but also the skills that come with a college degree and the respect that comes with being white and speaking a prestige dialect of English. I just retired (as a professor), and I have been amazed at the complexity involved in pensions and health insurance. A lot of this has to do with the array of "choices" that you're given, most of which end up being no choices at all. The choices give us the illusion that we're "free", just as we're free to choose from 10 different brands of toilet paper, but they just make everything way more complicated than it ought to be. The very wealthy hire people to manage all this for them. At the other end of the spectrum, people like your friend just end up screwed. Which is of course the point.

[rjs]

sadly, jodi, what you've seen will be repeated millions of times as the baby boom retires...pensions are one of the crisis areas i've been aggregating news & studies on for over 3 years...back in 09 it wasnt uncommon for public pension funds to be funded with an expected return of 10% or more..(one in PA was at 17%)

although the largest, like CALPERS, CALSTERS, & NYC have reduced their expected returns to 7.5%, it doesnt take an actuary to see how impossible even that lower target is to hit in this interest rate environment...so we'll see them pitting the pensioners against raising taxes on the voters eventually...

private pension funds aint any better off: quoting a digby article: "companies have slashed and burned their way through their employees' benefits, leaving former workers either on Social Security or destitute -- and taxpayers with a huge burden that, as the baby boomer generation edges towards retirement, is likely to grow.'..."Over the last decade, some of the biggest companies -- including Bank of America, IBM, General Motors, GE and even the NFL -- found loopholes, abused ambiguous regulations and used litigation to turn their employees' hard-earned retirement funds into profits, and in some cases, executive compensation"

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/pensions-what-pensions.html

[Jodi Dean]

rjs--shit. It's like you know things are bad and then you look closely and confront your lack of imagination because they are so, so much work that it is barely conceivable.

crack--it's sickening, this capitalist so-called freedom to be screwed and exploited at every step.

Alain--her own story is even worse; a number of years ago she was denied workmen's comp for a shoulder injury she got a work--one of the reasons had to do with a complicated medical form. She wasn't sure how to fill it out, didn't want to bother a doctor, and had briefly worked at another place (because she needed the money) which complicated the chain of who owed what to whom. It's like all the things the working poor need are packaged up as a massive stinking shit sandwich that they are supposed to be grateful for even as it doesn't give them what it promises and everyone condemns them for receiving it.

[Sulapeace1]

Jodi, thank you very much for posting this. It convinces me further, frankly, that those of us on the left who vote for Barack Obama this fall must hold his feet to the fire for the working poor. Not once during the whole democratic convention did anyone even hint at the crushing burdens confronting the 45,000,000 people who live below the poverty, the likely larger number who, though they work, cannot get through a week without several visits to the food bank, and those like your friend who are deprived of their pensions. All that talk of the middle class? The use even (at a Democratic convention no less!) of the phrase "pull oneself up by the bootstraps?" But boy, Michelle Obama sure looked purty in that dress. And didn't Clinton deliver? And Barack Obama, our first black president!

This story is sickening. Your blog is wonderful but this story belongs in the New York Times, The Washington Post, on CNN, MSNBC. Most of all, it belongs in the Oval Office.

[rjs]

jodi, i have linked to this post in a comment on an open thread at angry bear, where i have posted very irregularly...

http://www.angrybearblog.com/2012/09/open-thread-september-15-2012.html

there were a few comments on it and some advice in subsequent comments...

i dont know if any of it will be helpful, but social security experts are well represented among the regulars there, if you have any questions in that regard...

[Jodi Dean]

Thanks, Sulapeace.

RJS--I checked out that thread. Some very good advice re going to the SSA and seeing what the situation is. I'll prob end up taking my friend over there in the next couple of weeks. Anyway, thanks so much.