Meet America’s Next Pension Casualty
by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,
ZeroHedge.com
Thu, 05/10/2018
In 1923, a young Jewish immigrant from a small town in modern-day Ukraine founded a candy company in Brooklyn, New York that he called “Just Born”.
His name was Samuel Bernstein. And if you enjoy chocolate sprinkles or the hard, chocolate coating around ice cream bars, you can thank Bernstein– he invented them.
Nearly 100 years later, the company is still a family-owned business, producing some well-known brands like Peeps and Hot Tamales.
But business conditions in the Land of the Free have changed quite dramatically since Samuel Bernstein founded the company in 1923.
The costs to manufacture in the United States are substantial. And business regulations can be outright debilitating.
One of the major challenges facing Just Born these days is its gargantuan, underfunded pension fund.
Like a lot of large businesses, Just Born contributes to a pension fund that pays retirement benefits to its employees.
And in 2015, Just Born’s pension fund was deemed to be in “critical status”, prompting management to negotiate a solution with the employee union.
The union simply demanded that Just Born plug the funding gap, as if the company could merely write a check and make the problem go away.
Management pushed back, explaining that the pension gap could bankrupt the company.
And as an alternative, the company proposed to keep all existing retirees and current employees in the old pension plan, while putting all new employees into a different retirement plan.
It seemed like a reasonable solution that would maintain all the benefits that had been promised to existing employees, while still fixing the company’s long-term financial problem.
The Rest…HERE
