Tired Pilots

by digby

This makes me not want to fly anymore:

Sullenberger, a 58-year-old who joined a US Airways predecessor in 1980, told the House aviation subcommittee that his pay has been cut 40 percent in recent years and his pension has been terminated and replaced with a promise "worth pennies on the dollar" from the federally created Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. These cuts followed a wave of airline bankruptcies after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks compounded by the current recession, he said.

The reduced compensation has placed "pilots and their families in an untenable financial situation," Sullenberger said. "I do not know a single professional airline pilot who wants his or her children to follow in their footsteps."

The subcommittee of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee heard from the crew of Flight 1549, the air traffic controller who handled the flight and aviation experts to examine what safety lessons could be learned from the accident.

Sullenberger's copilot Jeffrey B. Skiles said unless federal laws are revised to improve labor-management relations "experienced crews in the cockpit will be a thing of the past." And Sullenberger added that without experienced pilots "we will see negative consequences to the flying public."

Sullenberger himself has started a consulting business to help make ends meet. Skiles added, "For the last six years, I have worked seven days a week between my two jobs just to maintain a middle class standard of living.

I don't want pilots working seven days a week, do you?

The point they raise is very important. The pension system in the US is well and truly screwed and with the stock market crash the idea that private investment in the market would completely replace it is now moribund. If anything, all this financial carnage argues for strengthening social security with higher benefits, not lower ones.

And Pete Peterson and the reformers most assuredly don't want that:

When I began working on the issue of Social Security, at Harvard Law School in 1978, Pete Peterson, a prominent conservative who had been secretary of Commerce under President Nixon, was arguing that the problem with the program was that the benefits were too high. With the average widow’s benefit at $500 a month back then, Peterson — a Wall Street banker to boot — didn’t get too far with his argument.


That article, by the way, was written by a conservative who was arguing for social security privatization on the merits as a way to raise benefits. Just imagine if those arguments had succeeded. Actually, we don't have to:

Italy did for retirement financing what President George W. Bush could not do in the U.S.: It privatized part of its social security system. The timing couldn’t have been worse.

The global market meltdown has created losses for those who agreed to shift their contributions from a government severance payment plan to private funds meant to yield higher returns. Anger is rising both at the state, which promoted the change, and money managers such as UniCredit and Arca Previdenza, which stood to profit.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s administration is now considering ways to compensate as many as 1.2 million people who made the switch, giving up a fixed return for private plans linked to financial markets. It’s also letting people delay redemptions on retirement funds to avoid losses after Italy’s benchmark stock index fell 50 percent in 2008, destroying 300 billion euros ($423 billion) in wealth.

"The reform didn’t help anyone," said Gabriele Fava, who heads the Fava & Associati law firm in Milan. "Not the government, which was hoping everyone would make the switch to take the strain off its coffers, nor the workers who have not resolved the problem of needing a supplement to their social security pensions."


To be fair, Pete Peterson has just jumped on any anti-social security bandwagon that came along over the years. He wasn't a particularly enthusiastic privatizer, although he certainly backed it.
As his pal relates above, he just thinks social security and medicare are "bankrupting" the country and he's thought so since the 70's, constructing new arguments all along the way when his dire predictions failed to materialize. It's clear that he just doesn't believe the government should be performing this function (which raises the question of what he thinks the government should be doing...)

But regardless of their motivation, anyone who was pushing privatization, which was sweeping the nation just three years ago, is no longer credible, period. As bad as things are with the housing crisis, the banking crisis, the stock market crash and the recession, if they had passed social security privatization during their 15 year or so crusade, the results would now be catastrophic.

Again, why are we listening to them?


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