[QUOTE] If the want rid of you that badly.........[/QUOTE] "Just one more heave, lads."
It wasn't my fault - he made me do it. For ****'s sake. Get a fucking grip. If all you cunts on commission weren't so fucking greedy and short-sighted, we might now be sitting on holiday in the Bahamas instead of huddling round a single candle.
A sub-prime borrower speaks - "it wasn't my fault - he made me do it". I'm not on commission. Their job is to make as much money as possible for their investors. You do that by taking risks. If you want to reduce the level of risk, you have to change the regulations. You seem to think they should've just decided to not do their job as well as they could, which is a great way to make sure you don't keep that job for long.
I was thinking of the businesses that took pension holidays and stopped paying contributions to their employees' funds, only to ruin the pension schemes when things got tight, by closing final salary schemes, for example. There seem to be companies which believe that the pension scheme is working capital. For example, Unilever were profitable when they did this: Unilever, the maker of Wall's ice cream and Persil enjoyed seven years of pension holidays. It not only saved millions of pounds but in 1999 also swiped the fund's 270m "surplus", adding it to Unilever's profits. Since 1992 it has stripped 1.2bn from its fund and about two thirds, 726m, was handed back to shareholders in the form of higher profits and bigger dividends. Bitter? Unilever pensioners certainly are. They have run a long-term campaign for the money to be used to boost their pensions rather than directors' salaries, but without success. http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2004/jul/10/pensions.jobsandmoney
I've done nothing of the sort, I simply sell my time to an organisation willing to pay me a decent going rate for it. Nothing more, nothing less... no bigger picture. I'm one of a few hundred thousand worker bees making the best of a situation at any given time. Life is imperfect. It always has and always will be broken somewhere. Bread and circuses.
One could say the same of all the people borrowing beyond their means, creating the credit and housing bubbles in the first place.
Sure, some companies are scumbags, no doubt about that. But again, it's not all their fault is it? Most people will end up with small pensions because they don't pay enough in themselves, not because their employers have screwed them over (& I include myself in that group). But who does that article say is "public enemy number one when it comes to pensions"? Not the corporations, but Gordon Brown. It's yet another area of financial services that he had over a decade to fix, but instead he just made it far, far worse. Blame what the Tories did three decades if you like, but if you've got three successive terms in government & still don't change something, it's because you don't want to.
Unilever are not an isolated case: Collectively, according to Inland Revenue figures, employers saved almost 18bn during the 1990s pension holidays - although staff were forced to carry on making payments. It was a time of booming corporate profits, although in hindsight much of that profit came directly from the savings in pension contributions. So companies were `profitable' because they were stealing their employees' pay. The article doesn't: the economic adviser to the Ernst and Young ITEM club does.
Not that easy to research it from where I am currently typing but my recollection is that the government accounting rules penalised companies if they didn't take a break when the funds were in surplus.
I didn't say they were. Don't be ridiculous. Employer pension contributions are not "employees' pay", & they weren't 'stolen'. They're a voluntary perk that can be legally withdrawn at any time. Semantics in the extreme, and many other experts agreed with them.
The difference being, they weren't so-called 'professionals' in the finance trade. Like lambs to the slaughter they were and made lots of money for the greedy cunts working the levers of the system like there was no tomorrow. I think it behooves the cunts in the finance industry to keep their fucking heads below the fucking parapet for while yet. I ain't fucking finished and my gun's still loaded.
Investments are more my area than pensions, but 'deferred pay' always used to be a specific type of final salary scheme where the employer *couldn't* reduce their contribution. So completely irrelevant to this topic.
Watched the news the other day where they were happily announcing 1 in 5 will now live to 100. Doesn't that make retirement at 65 a little silly?
It does, but I'm also not convinced living to 100 will be a good thing for everyone given the chance of Alzheimer's increasing with age. Time for carousel.
