'Retirement Heist' compiles evidence of plundered pensions

— -- Sometimes the real crime consists of activities considered "legal," despite the damage they cause. That adage has never been more apt than when applied to the termination of pension funds by U.S. employers large, midsize and small. Over and over, loyal, deserving employees with modest incomes have watched their planned retirement savings disappear because of corporate managers and pension industry consultants.

Journalist Ellen Schultz has been writing about such shameful behavior for a long time, mostly in The Wall Street Journal. Now she has pulled together the copious, irrefutable evidence between the covers of a book. It is shocking, and demoralizing. But will members of Congress and federal agency regulators stop what Schultz calls "retirement heists"? Probably not, unless voters make it clear the incumbents will lose their jobs unless something changes. Unfortunately, voters are rarely if ever that organized, no matter how much they have been cheated by corporate chieftains.

The book is crammed with heartbreaking anecdotes of retirees suffering (and in some cases probably dying) because of pension-related corporate greed. But the perpetrators have not been charged with any crimes. In most cases documented by Schultz, the perpetrators have escaped widespread blame — except in her investigative pieces and now in this book.

Schultz opens the book with a look at the December 2010 annual outlook investor meeting sponsored by General Electric and CEO Jeffrey Immelt. (She could have focused on another corporation and another chief executive just as effectively, because the pension heists are so numerous.)

Immelt spoke about the problems for the corporation's profitability caused by the pension plan and medical benefits, announcing those benefits would be closed to newly hired employees.

Immelt and other corporate spokespeople have that suggested pension plan shortfalls are caused by out-of-control factors such as the large number of retirees, declining stock market investment returns and competition from overseas competitors that eschew good benefits for laborers.

Schultz knows better from her extensive research. She is a reporter who has become an expert in a relatively narrow subject matter. As she writes, "What Immelt didn't mention was that, far from being a burden, GE's pension and retiree plans had contributed billions of dollars to the company's bottom line over the past decade and a half, and were responsible for a chunk of the earnings that the executives had taken credit for. Nor were these retirement programs — even with GE's 230,000 retirees — bleeding the company of cash. In fact, GE hadn't contributed a cent to the workers' pension plans since 1987 but still had enough money to cover all the current and future retirees."

Then Schultz delivers the clincher: GE was indeed burdened by a pension plan — the plan for top executives. The obligations of that plan, for a minuscule number of individuals compared with the 230,000 lower-level retirees, totaled $4.4 billion and had drained about $573 million from the corporate treasury over the past three years.

When reading an investigative book, the consumer must decide whether to trust those who are exposed, who usually have a major stake in hiding the truth, or those conducting the exposure, who usually have little or no direct stake in spreading the truth. This book is not even a close call. Schultz's evidence is solid, based on her presentations in the text and the end notes.

How such corporate executives and their retirement heist allies sleep well at night is a puzzle to anybody with a conscience and a sense of fair play.