Companies controlled by PE firms use bankruptcy to shed pension obligations
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Re: Companies controlled by PE firms use bankruptcy to shed pension obligations
#2Its a shame that pensioneers are so low on the bankruptcy list.
The banks of America's and Lehman bros get their money before the people who are working the business to survive do.
Without basic income you need a job to survive but at the same time you're being exploited while you work that job.
Re: Companies controlled by PE firms use bankruptcy to shed pension obligations
#3I worked at Marsh from 2005-2015 in both corporate and the store. We were always skeptical of Sun, the CEOs that would cycle through didn't grasp the basics of grocery, and as an organization we failed to invest in basic infrastructure that would reduce our overall costs which are huge in the 2% margin grocery business.
At the store we had registers with an OS from the 80's, a common thing if you look around, but we never invested in developing anything beyond the 80's unlike our competitors. We didn't ever implement a JIT style logistics program, which with massive in store staff cuts led to poor merchandise orders which in a perishable business kills you. Management in general was _highly_ skeptical of new technology and prone to spending a bunch of labor hours on repetitive, easily automated tasks (by my accounting at the time, I could have automated more than a million dollars of labor costs with a week of effort - something I brought up with management and demonstrated but was ultimately shot down, I wasn't some super genius - we had folks literally copying and pasting for 8 hours a day).
Marsh was a good company with good people, several of those in the article I knew from my time in corporate. We had folks that would kill themselves working 60 hour weeks to keep a store afloat. It sucks to see what had happened to them.
Re: Companies controlled by PE firms use bankruptcy to shed pension obligations
#4Still amazing to me that owners and equity firms get money before pension funds. The literal theft - a pension is part of your income, and being able to sell off a company without paying off pension debts literally means retroactively stealing wages from workers.
Remember that banks, etc all have insurance on their debt, apparently that doesn’t matter - companies are simply stealing from money that is not theirs, and that’s apparently ok.
Re: Companies controlled by PE firms use bankruptcy to shed pension obligations
#5Its a shame that pensioneers are so low on the bankruptcy list. The banks of America's and Lehman bros get their money before the people who are working the business to survive do. Without basic income you need a job to survive but at the same time you're being exploited while you work that job.
In Canada, pensions are close to the top of who gets paid out in bankruptcy. Doesn't help a lot, they just sell off all the pieces and pay off insiders before entering bankruptcy.
Re: Companies controlled by PE firms use bankruptcy to shed pension obligations
#6When Sun bought Marsh Supermarkets, the company had three retirement plans. One for the top five Marsh executives, one for the store employees, and one for the warehouse workers.
Only the executives’ plan, however, was fully funded under the sales agreement: With the completion of Sun’s purchase, Marsh’s top five executives were to be awarded $14 million in retirement payments, according to company financial documents. Among them: CEO Don Marsh at $7 million and corporate counsel P. Lawrence Butt at $2.2 million.
Meanwhile, the other two retirement plans — the worker pensions — were short millions of dollars.
Re: Companies controlled by PE firms use bankruptcy to shed pension obligations
#7Still amazing to me that owners and equity firms get money before pension funds. The literal theft - a pension is part of your income, and being able to sell off a company without paying off pension debts literally means retroactively stealing wages from workers. Remember that banks, etc all have insurance on their debt, apparently that doesn’t matter - companies are simply stealing from money that is not theirs, and…
It’s only ok because they’ve written all the laws for themselves. Of course the common person would not deem this to be ok.
Re: Companies controlled by PE firms use bankruptcy to shed pension obligations
#8On some levels the government insuring pensions like this creates an economic incentive to do exactly what these guys are doing.
Re: Companies controlled by PE firms use bankruptcy to shed pension obligations
#9On some levels the government insuring pensions like this creates an economic incentive to do exactly what these guys are doing.
If you don't want to do that, then jail would be a fine disincentive.
Re: Companies controlled by PE firms use bankruptcy to shed pension obligations
#10Oliver Stone's Wall Street was not an instruction manual.