@LuckyGuy – Delphi is a fairly special case that gets muddied by the intervention of the Obama administration in the bankruptcy of GM. Which pensions were saved and which were not had more to do with Obama picking winners and losers than anything else. Your Home Depot example is good. That’s how business is supposed to work under a capitalistic system. If you don’t provide good service, you lose business. As for the McD example, that is simply way off base. Most of the minimum wages earners are not employees of McDonalds (most other fast food brands as well) but rather employees of the franchise owner, the small business owner. Paying the CEO of McDonalds more or less has nothing to do with the pay of the guy making french fries. These are the kinds of arguments we hear all the time and they simply don’t represent either business in general nor our system.
The issue with pensions is a real one. Unions and workers love to have someone else guarantee a fixed income for the rest of your life. Unfortunately the company is seldom in that business. The payout is 30–40 years down the road and how do you anticipate the final value when interest rates and markets move dramatically up and down. Hell we’ve had zero interest rates for 6 years now, if your trying to grow retirement funds how do you compensate for that? Plus the life expectancy has increased by 10 years and we have more women in the workforce which makes the life expectancy even longer. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, we are retiring earlier.
Company pension plans are a thing of the past. 401s give you more control and take the money away from the corporate execs. We need a little more flexibility for them but if you want someone else to handle your money, occasionally they will rip you off. That’s life and the economic system has nothing to do with it.