Morning Future Present

Location: Living room, Toad Woods

Music: Greg Brown, Iowa Waltz

Breaking the fast: coffee, cereal, bagels, bacon & scallion cream cheese, freshly-baked and warm pumpkin quick bread muffins. Juice and milk on hand for those who want it.

Those: malkingrey, Himself, Twin B, and me.

Gear: Books, two laptops, one netbook, and one e-reader/smart phone/whatever, and knitting.

Jim's sitting in my great-aunt Anna's chair. I'm knitting a dishrag using the traditional ballband pattern...and Italian cotton. Life is timeless; life is good.

Safety nets and the lack thereof

One of the many things I like about self-employment is that I've known from the start that I was operating without a safety net. (If I'd been better at the self-employment game, I probably would have been able to craft one by hand. Instead, 20 years later, I'm still up there on the high wire even at those times when I'm hanging on to it by my fingernails.)

All along, I've appreciated the clarity of my situation. Knowing there wasn't a net below me was far more comforting than the illusion of a corporate safety net -- yes, there was certainly some sort of net there. Over ten years in Corporate America, I saw that safety net catch several coworkers who fell into the net due to corporate restructurings, layoffs, and various medical/disability issues. But I saw at least as many other coworkers make the same sorts of falls only to drop through weak spots and even huge holes in the safety net that was supposedly there for everyone. There was a net, all right, but I never knew whether or not it would catch me. For me, the illusion of safety is more distressing than working without a net at all.

I can deal with the freak accidents that can happen with a solid safety net, the random roll of the dice that drops someone through or bounces them off. But not a net that's clearly full of holes and transient weak spots so even "fall to the left and you'll be all right" can't be counted on.

Today's review of recent Court filings in the Visteon Bankruptcy brought personal insights into the thousands of people falling through the safety net as past promises made are cast aside and a generation of retired Ford Motor employees are abandoned not by the company they retired from, but by another that was never of their choosing.

First, the highlights of what seems to be going on with the Committee of Unsecured Creditors. (That's the group representing me and the rest of the $1.3 billion in unsecured debt the company held at the time it filed for bankruptcy.) The Committee has approached Visteon to discuss alternative plan structures -- presumably the Committee wants an outcome that give unsecured creditors some recompense rather than none at all.

The Committee is asking the Court to compell PriceWaterhousecoopers to provide various documents as part of the Committee's review of financial documents filed. PriceWaterhousecoopers objects to the Committee's motion, arguing all sorts of things that sound reasonable up on the surface. I don't know enough to judge further, only enough to say that outside of Court when you froth on about the 18 reasons something is rubbish, it's rarely a good sign. Especially when the 18 things contradict themselves. Quasi-quoted: -"The motion should be rejected because we're already giving them everything they want without needing a court order"- and -"The motion should be rejected because they're now asking for stuff we say is extraneous and don't plan to give them."-

So there's that. Court hearings on the matter are delayed until mid-February, and there's already mention in the motions of extending at least some parts until April.

But then there are the dozens of letters from retirees, objecting to their pensions being turned over to the Federal Government's Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. I find myself in total sympathy with them.

Yes, there are all sorts of arguments about why pension deals made in the past weren't good long-term business practices for the companies that made them, that they weren't affordable, that they're too burdensome, etc. etc.

As always, there's plenty enough blame to go around, but dammit, the companies made the offers. They made the promises. Ford did; Visteon did; and all the related subsidiaries, too. Their employees accepted the deals, some of them cutting their work lives short in exchange for the guarantees being offered. And now the guarantees have proven not to be guarantees at all. Retiree health and life insurance is going away on April 1st, even for retirees who didn't work for Visteon a single day of their working years, who retired years before Visteon existed. Other life-long Ford employees spent the last few years of their worklife with Visteon when Ford spun the group off, then took early retirement deals meeting deadlines Visteon imposed as the company struggled to downsize and offload the expense of employees with the most seniority.

Adrian Legg perhaps said it best when he spoke about contracts in the music industry, about how the performer pays a lawyer to look out for his or her interests. To the performer's eye, the contract says "you get screwed, you get screwed, you get screwed, you get screwed." The lawyer reviews it and concurs, adding -"here on page doubley-X, sub-clause 28f, it say's 'you get screwed; you might not have noticed that. That'll be $500." Right.

The letters are from people like my father, people of the generation where it was normal to work for one company your entire career. ( Behind the cut: excerpts from the Retiree Objections )

Arrrgh.