CSotD: Real Life Misadventures
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There are several alternative cartoonists who could take four or a dozen panels to explain how little your employer cares about you.
And then Gary Wise and Lance Aldrich do it in a single-panel Real Life Adventures cartoon.
I've been through this scenario. When I hired on with a paper owned by a division of Dow Jones back in the late 80s, we had a pension plan.
It was a pretty standard part of the deal, as it was for most professional positions, by which I mean, not everyone got a pension: Fast food has always been a crappy place for kids to work, and you had to get off the floor at a retail gig before things began to look up.
That hasn't changed, though I think advancement has become more difficult in this world of mega-huge corporations with throw-away interchangeable employees. This Politifact posting makes the point that, while Wal-Mart does have more employees on welfare than other companies, that's partially because Wal-Mart has more employees than other companies.
And it's partially because they don't give a damn about their employees. Or "associates" or "partners" or whatever title they give them in lieu of decent pay and benefits.
And yes, I've seen the poor underpaid, unappreciated bastards stand in a semicircle, singing each to each, before the store opens in the morning.
It's like a mash-up of J. Alfred Prufrock and Oliver Twist and I pray god they will not sing to me.
So anyway, we had these pensions and we had yearly cost-of-living raises plus we moved up on the payscale for the first several years.
And, although we were owned by someone down in the northern suburbs of New York City, our publisher had enough local control that she could change policy so that we earned our second week of vacation after five years instead of seven. (Overseas readers just fell out of their chairs.)
Our little division of the newspaper publishing world was divvying up the proceeds among a family only a few members of which actually showed up at corporate HQ on a regular basis and several others of whom just deposited the checks and bought polo ponies and whatever.
Then a couple of the latter contingent decided they needed more polo ponies and whatever, so they had lunch with Warren Buffett and discussed how they might be able to squeeze the golden eggs out of the goose at a little faster pace.
So there were changes. I remember one time, after some years of these beneficial changes, when the CEO of the division — one of those few members of the family who worked for a living — came by for a visit and we had a little coffee-and-cookies session in the breakroom and he explained how much more wonderful everything was.
And someone asked him when we were going to get cost-of-living raises again, and he said we'd been getting them all along. And that was the wrong answer because we might have been loyal but we weren't stupid and we knew that we hadn't had COLAs in two years, which is to say, since three years ago.
By then, however, our pensions were long past. Early on, before the real grumbling began, we were told we were getting something better than pensions! We were going to have 401k's, which meant that we could put as much as we wanted into a pre-tax retirement account and the company would do a 2-for-1 match up to a certain percentage of our pay. Three or five percent, I think.
Which was cool, though, after awhile, they announced that they were only going to do a 1-to-1 match. Which was still okay. But then they announced that they weren't going to be able to do the matching thing after all.
Which is about the time we stopped getting cost of living raises.
The scary thing is, as bad as it got there (there was a lot more Milo Minderbinder stuff to come), it could have been worse.
Some companies force you to invest your 401k in their own stock, which is kind of like punching a second hole in the lifeboat to let the water out.
And I lived in South Bend, Indiana, from 1967 to 1972, and saw little old ladies any one of whom could have been my grandmother, flipping burgers because, when Studebaker went down, their pensions went with it.
Gerald Ford fixed that and pensions today are guaranteed, bless his heart. (Yeah, Republicans had hearts back then. You young folks are learning all sorts of things today, aren't you?)
So my pension was guaranteed to give me a little under $350 a month once I turned 65. Not a lot, but I hadn't been with the company very long when they cancelled the program. Timing is everything.
In October, they wrote to me and said they'd rather just pay it to me in a lump sum and I said okay and the check should come soon and then I can roll it over into my 401k.
The lump sum, if you do the math, assumes that I am likely to live to be 77, which really gave me a laugh.
First time those dumb bastards have ever erred on the side of generosity!
Milo: Nately died a wealthy man, Yossarian. He had over sixty shares in the syndicate.
Yossarian: What difference does that make? He's dead.
Milo: Then his family will get it.
Yossarian: He didn't have time to have a family.
Milo: Then his parents will get it.
Yossarian: They don't need it, they're rich.
Milo: Then they'll understand.
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