The Broken Promise

A TIME investigation looks at how companies are leaving millions of Americans at risk of an impoverished retirement and how Congress let it happen

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Under a new management team headed by Jacques Nasser, former chairman of Ford Motor Co., Polaroid returned to profitability almost overnight. Little more than two years after the company emerged from bankruptcy, One Equity sold it to a Minnesota entrepreneur for $426 million in cash. The new managers, who had received stock in the postbankruptcy Polaroid, walked away with millions of dollars. Nasser got $12.8 million for his 1 million shares. Other executives and directors were rewarded for their efforts. Rick Lazio, a four-term Republican from West Islip, N.Y., who effectively gave up his House seat for an unsuccessful Senate run against Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2000, collected $512,675 for a brief stint as a director. That amounted to nearly twice the $282,000 paid to all 6,000 retirees. The $12.08 a share that the new managers received for little more than two years of work was 134 times the 9ยข a share handed out earlier to lifelong workers.

LET'S BREAK A DEAL

Washington has a rich history of catering to special and corporate interests at the expense of ordinary citizens. Nowhere is this more evident than in legislation dealing with company pensions. It has been this way since 1964, when carmaker Studebaker Corp. collapsed after 60 years, junking the promised pensions of 4,000 workers not yet eligible for retirement, pensions the company had spelled out in brochures for years: "You may be a long way from retirement age now. Still, it's good to know that Studebaker is building up a fund for you, so that when you reach retirement age you can settle down on a farm, visit around the country or just take it easy, and know that you'll still be getting a regular monthly pension paid for entirely by the company."

Oops. There oughta be a law.

It took Congress 10 years to respond to the Studebaker pension abandonment by writing the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) of 1974. It established minimum standards for retirement plans in private industry and created the PBGC to guarantee them. Then President Gerald Ford summed up the measure when he signed it into law that Labor Day: "This legislation will alleviate the fears and the anxiety of people who are on the production lines or in the mines or elsewhere, in that they now know that their investment in private pension funds will be better protected."

Perhaps for some, but far from all.

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