Verizon Says No Strike Called as Talks Continue With Unions

Verizon Communications Inc. said employees will continue to work as negotiations continue between unions and the second-largest U.S. telephone company on an agreement on benefits.

Contracts with the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers expired Saturday night at midnight New York time, the company said in a statement.

The telecommunications giant is pushing back against union demands such as increasing tuition assistance and eliminating employee health-insurance contributions, which were instituted for the first time in the 2012 contract. Verizon’s initial offer in June included a 2 percent wage increase in each of the first two years of the three-year contract, plus a lump-sum payment in the final year.

“The company has barely moved off its initial June 22nd proposal,” Ed Mooney, a vice president for Communications Workers of America, said in a separate statement.

Trimming Benefits

Verizon is seeking to cut costs as U.S. households give up their traditional home phones in favor of mobile technology. The New York-based company wants to negotiate changes to health-care and pension benefits that would make it more competitive, according to a statement on Friday. Verizon would require union employees to choose between continuing to earn pension benefits or receiving company matching funds for an enhanced 401(k) retirement savings plan.

“We are disappointed that after six weeks of good faith bargaining and a very strong effort by the company, we have been unable to reach new agreements with the unions,” Marc Reed, Verizon’s chief administrative officer, said in a statement on Sunday.

Workers walked off the job for two weeks in 2011 during contract negotiations, which then dragged into the next year. After 15 weeks of talks, an agreement was reached that preserved a ban on layoffs of workers hired before 2003 and restricted Verizon’s ability to reassign employees far from their homes.

Verizon has taken measures to ensure that customer service will continue in the event of a work stoppage, according to Richard Young, a company spokesman. Thousands of non-union employees have been trained in recent months to cover for striking workers, he said.

Via: Bloomberg Business

Continue Reading....

ECONOMIST: GOVERNMENT PREPARING TO SEIZE 401(K) PENSIONS

Supreme Court ruling sets the stage for "economic totalitarianism"

Economist Martin Armstrong warns that a Supreme Court ruling last week has set the stage for the federal government to begin seizing private pension funds.

According to Armstrong, the outcome of Tibble v. Edison, which found that employers have a duty to protect their workers’ 401(k) plans from mutual funds that perform poorly, will grease the skids for the feds to seize private funds and prosecute companies who manage mutual funds badly.

“Between the court ruling and the Obama administration’s push for stronger fiduciary rules,” the developments send a, “strong message that government can much easier seize the pension fund management industry of course to “protect the consumer,” writes Armstrong, warning that the ruling, “sets the stage to JUSTIFY government seizure of private pension funds to protect pensioners,” when the economy gets “messy”.

“This fits perfectly just in time for the Obama administration’s next assault as they prepare a landmark change of its own by issuing rules requiring that financial advisers put the interest of customers ahead of their own,” writes Armstrong. “This creates a very gray area wide enough to justify public seizure of pension funds under management.”

Following the 2008 financial collapse, reports emerged that the federal government was planning to seize the private 401(k) pensions of millions of Americans while enforcing an additional 5 per cent payroll tax as part of a new bailout program that would empower the Social Security Administration to redistribute pension funds “fairly” amongst citizens.

Armstrong warns that the development is part of a wider move towards “economic totalitarianism,” which is also characterized by efforts to eliminate physical cash altogether in the name of giving central banks more power.

Numerous prominent individuals have called for hard currency to be banned in recent months, including former Bank of England economist Jim Leaviss, who wrote a piece for the Telegraph which argued that, “Forcing everyone to spend only by electronic means from an account held at a government-run bank would give the authorities far better tools to deal with recessions and economic booms.”

Earlier this month, German Council Of Economic expert Peter Bofinger also said that imposing a cashless society would make it easier for central banks to enforce their economic policy.

As we have covered at length, commercial banks are beginning to impose more draconian controls on the withdrawal and depositing of cash, with the practice being treated as a suspicious activity even for relatively modest sums.

Armstrong, who correctly predicted the 1987 Black Monday crash as well as the 1998 Russian financial collapse, also warned last year that a coming financial collapse will cause widespread riots to erupt in America by 2016.

Via: Inforwars.com

Continue Reading....

Most Americans accumulating debt faster than they’re saving for retirement

A majority of Americans with 401(k)-type savings accounts are accumulating debt faster than they are setting aside money for retirement, further undermining the nation’s troubled system for old-age saving, a new report has found.

Three in five workers with defined contribution accounts are “debt savers,” according to the report released Thursday, meaning their increasing mortgages, credit card balances and installment loans are outpacing the amount of money they are able to save for retirement.

The imbalance is expanding even as policymakers are encouraging people to set aside more by offering generous tax breaks and automatically enrolling workers in retirement accounts that in some cases automatically escalate the amount of money over time.

Currently, workers with retirement savings accounts put aside more than 11 percent of their pay for retirement — 5 percent in their own accounts, and 6.2 percent in Social Security.

Despite that — and despite the $2.5 trillion the report says employers have poured into defined contribution accounts from 1992 to 2012 — the retirement readiness of most Americans has been slipping, according to the report by HelloWallet, a D.C. firm that offers technology-based financial advice to workers and conducts research of economic behavior.

“Policy has tunnel vision. It tends to tackle problems on a piecemeal basis. The impact of policy on consumer finances is a bit like playing a game of Whac-A-Mole,” said Matt Fellowes, founder and chief executive of HelloWallet and a former Brookings Institution scholar. “We raised the victory flag as people increased retirement contributions, but in reality the ability of people to retire is a function of lots of different variables, most important of which is what they are doing on the other side of the ledger.”

Via: Washington Post
Continue Reading.....