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'General Motors, Sears and Toys R Us: Layoffs Across America Highlight Our Shredding Financial Safety Net' (nbcnews.com)
New submitter Bruce Henry shares a story: Today's aging workforce faces an uncertain future. The announcement this week that General Motors will lay off 15 percent of its salaried workforce and shutter multiple plants in North America was a sobering reminder of how far the American worker has fallen. Unlike most large private sector corporations today, thousands of employees at GM still enjoy some union benefits. The company has reportedly set aside $2 billion for layoffs and buyouts. It's not much, but it's something -- many workers, if they are laid off en masse, will be far less lucky. Some older Americans are lucky enough to have been grandfathered into generous pension plans and others hope social security and personal savings will be enough to sustain themselves. But for millions of younger people, the outlook is bleaker -- an ever-diminishing social safety net, with retirement dependent almost entirely on how well they manage savings. Two-thirds of millennials have nothing saved for retirement.
The private sector pension as we once knew it is all but dead. Public sector pensions, meanwhile, are under attack at the state level. "Companies don't offer pensions anymore. Social security, when it was established, was meant to be one leg of a stool," says Gerald Friedman, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "One leg would be the private pension through employment, a second leg personal savings, and a third leg social security. Social security is now the only source of income of a lot elderly have." What, if anything, are our politicians doing about this? Progressives rail against President Donald Trump, but real retirement security has not been a big enough part of the conversation on either side of the political spectrum. Millions of Americans are in danger of entering their final decades unable to afford ballooning medical bills and cost-of-living expenses. This is a huge problem, and one that liberals in particular should have capitalized on this election cycle.
The private sector pension as we once knew it is all but dead. Public sector pensions, meanwhile, are under attack at the state level. "Companies don't offer pensions anymore. Social security, when it was established, was meant to be one leg of a stool," says Gerald Friedman, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "One leg would be the private pension through employment, a second leg personal savings, and a third leg social security. Social security is now the only source of income of a lot elderly have." What, if anything, are our politicians doing about this? Progressives rail against President Donald Trump, but real retirement security has not been a big enough part of the conversation on either side of the political spectrum. Millions of Americans are in danger of entering their final decades unable to afford ballooning medical bills and cost-of-living expenses. This is a huge problem, and one that liberals in particular should have capitalized on this election cycle.
GM is highly dependent on sales in China, which imports 13 billion dollars of cars from the US. GM also operates plants and joint ventures in China too. So to the degree that sanctions inflict economic pain on China, US companies and their workers will suffer along with the Chinese. This can affect even workers who are working on products sold in the US. As a company's resources contract, they direct those resources away from projects that are less profitable in the short term.
Now you could argue that we'd have been better off never getting into a trade relationship with China. That would be non-orthodox from an economic point of view, but you could make the case. But even if that were true, that doesn't mean you're better off disrupting that relationship. In business what you can accomplish from where you are is what matters, not where you could have been if things had been different.
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As I understand it; Bain Capital came in and loaded ToysR Us down with debt, paid themselves, and sold off the husk.
From "This Day On Slashdot":
2005, Canada moves to keep skilled workers: https://it.slashdot.org/story/...
200, Election results certified: https://slashdot.org/story/00/...
Slashdot has always had stories about issues that affect nerds, like employment and politics.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Bullshit. My wife also died from ALS. We *HAD* both LTC and LTD insurance. Certainly didn't make up ANYWHERE near what her salary was.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
The beginning of the end of Toys R Us was the leveraged buyout (because the company was sitting on assets, had very little debt, but had hit on a couple slow quarters in sales). Bain Capital took the company, realigned the board with their players and reshuffled the executive team. They then sold off the assets, leased them back, borrowed money to the hilt and paid off the loans they took to make the leveraged buyout. And paid themselves a lot of money because they were so brilliant. What was left was a company that might have been able to change with the market and find some way to compete with Amazon, who is cleaning house in the toy bizz right now. Instead, with sales dropping every quarter as people are buying online because they don't have time to go shopping anymore, and the company already hocked to the gills and borrowing the limit of what it can, there was nothing left with which to change strategy and compete. In the end, the Bain-led board and executives took the company into bankruptcy, closed out the last of the assets and paid themselves yet again for doing such a good job destroying the company. Maybe they can make even more selling off the brand name...
my mom is one of these people. She is a hardcore trump fan and my parents both worked for 40+ years each and thought they had saved for a comfortably for retirement. Well my mom has gotten a serious medical condition and it is a real possibility that all they saved over the course of their lives could be wiped out and they will go bankrupt having to pay the medical bills that the greedy private health insurance is fighting paying at every turn. Helping your neighbor is very American, but I have no idea how conservatives with this "I got mine" attitude is benefiting my mom now that they did everything right and are about thrown out on the street for being medically bankrupt.