Looks like Jeff Bezos has discovered some more employee benefits he can take away. (cc photo: James Duncan Davidson)
The Washington Post (9/23/14) reported that the paper’s new ownership would be slashing retirement benefits for employees:
The Washington Post announced large cuts in retirement benefits on Tuesday, declaring that it would eliminate future retirement medical benefits and freeze defined-benefit pensions for nonunion employees.
The company also said that in negotiations that started Tuesday, it will seek to impose the same conditions on employees covered by the union—one of the first indications of how the Post‘s new owner, Amazon.com founder Jeffrey P. Bezos, will manage relations with the staff of the news organization.
The changes will hit hardest at employees hired before 2009 who could plan on receiving pension payments based on their income and years of service. Each of those employees could see scores—or hundreds—of thousands of dollars less over the course of a retirement.
Now, that’s a rotten thing to do—taking away large sums of money that you promised people for their retirement after years of service. Where could Bezos have gotten the idea that it was OK to act that way?
Well, maybe he reads the paper he just bought.
The Washington Post has a long tradition—in its news reports and its editorials—of calling on politicians to treat public employees and their pensions the way that Bezos is treating the Post‘s. As Peter Hart (FAIR Blog, 9/12/14) wrote earlier this month:
The Washington Post (9/10/14) was unsurprisingly happy with the primary’s result, noting that Raimondo faced down “ferocious opposition from labor” because she had dared to explain “the plain budgetary impossibility of maintaining pensions” as promised. To the Post, “her primary victory is an encouraging sign that many voters, including Democrats, have woken up to the peril posed by years of reckless promises by office-holders beholden to public-employee unions.”
Anything that hurts labor unions, workers and moves Democrats to the right must be something to cheer about.
Now, I want to make it clear that I oppose sauce for the goose as well as sauce for the gander. But hopefully the Post staff will attend to this reminder that they and the ruling class do not share the same interests, though they often write as though they do. You may see yourself as part of Team Billionaire, but Jeff Bezos sees it differently.
To the Post, “her primary victory is an encouraging sign that many voters, including Democrats, have woken up to the peril posed by years of reckless promises by office-holders beholden to public-employee unions.”
And yet they fail completely to understand that the years of reckless promises made by Office-holders to the Corporate Lords and Master have done more to destroy the economy than all of the “Defined pensions combined.
Be careful what you dish for
You may end up on the menu
What a cheapskate billionaire! OK, Jeff!! No more Amazon for me!!! Asta Lobotomy!!!!
Oh wow! And sad, very sad. I read a poem where Langston Hughes said that “….one say America will be…” I think we would like how it USED TO BE a lot better.
And—Mr. Bezos wants to use drones for delivery–wow, oh wow. That’s creepy. Will unruly employees expect to see their delivery go KABOOM, if they get out of line?
Sousa should demand his march back.
Sadly this is not BIGGER NEWS, it just shows how beaten down the working class is. That the Post didn’t know that they were the working class, in a very 19C Mr. Scrooge sort of way sad irony. ‘
Now in retirement the Post workers can join the temporary RV transient living seniors scraping by a living on Amazon temp jobs for little money and hard work in Amazon’s back office warehouses.
Anybody who would take an equal cut from the just-read, average resale of a customer’s newly-bought book from Amazon, who then tried to make room on his bookshelf for others is, as Robert McChesney pointed out in Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy, a bully. This story points out the dire need for revolt, revolution, rebellion and sedition. What’s Bezos’s salary? And his net worth? Why not we pay workers’ pensions out of the fatuous windfalls profits capitalist slime like Bezos make their fortune on? His employees sweat. Many who come for wool are themselves shorn.
I’m curious what the projections look like for these folks, and if they were in their contracts when hired how this can be okay (though faced with accepting a change in your contract or not having a job I guess most folks will take the lesser evil)
How long until Bezos tries this on the Amazon employees? Though the packages there aren’t especially good with a lot of things like bonuses being paid in deferred stock (RSUs) that don’t vest for a couple of years so their high staff turnover is really beneficial as they don’t have to pay out