You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt

- Tennessee Ernie Ford

In the past few weeks, there have been a number of news stories about companies in financial trouble. Some airlines are talking about bankruptcy; a Kentucky workers compensation fund was taken over by the state; and a Kentucky coal company went to bankruptcy court and asked to quit paying for health insurance on their retired coal miners.

All of these stories have a similar theme. Companies asked workers to help them grow and make profits. In return, they promised the workers security. Now the companies want to get out of those promises.

Workers trusted the companies they worked for to provide them with health insurance, pensions and workers compensation benefits. Many workers took less in salary to get better benefits. People turned down other job opportunities to keep those benefits. Workers devoted their lives to the companies and deserve to be rewarded for that loyalty.

Now that management made bad decisions or bad investments, they want to make the workers pay for it. It is not right.

The primary victims are people who are older or injured. Some will file bankruptcy or lose everything.

It should be noted that older people are filing more bankruptcies than anytime in history. The main reason cited is seniors were counting on health insurance or pensions that were cut off.

In several cases, pension benefits are guaranteed by state or federal governments. It is good in that the workers may get some of the benefits they were supposed to get. However, these guaranteed benefits often come from taxpayer dollars. You and I will pay for the mistakes the company executives made.

Fewer and fewer companies offer the pension benefits and health insurance that the coal miners are fighting to hold onto to. Most companies have given up on the idea of having an employee work for them for life. Instead of lifetime benefits, they offer no pension or 401k plans that workers control and can take with them when they leave.

Usually the companies that promised lifetime health insurance and pensions are industries like coal and steel, where the work is hard and dangerous. The workers were promised the benefits as a reward for braving those dangers.

I've seen a number of coal companies put pension and workers compensation money in a trust fund or buy annuities to guarantee workers benefits. These companies put money aside to back up the promises they made.

I've worked with several different coal companies that decided to buy annuities for their workers. One company used them to make sure that every one of their workers had a pension for the rest of their lives. Another used annuities to make sure every injured worker got their workers compensation.

I would like to say that the companies were buying the annuities just to be nice but actually they had a lot of high powered tax and financial reasons to make that decision.

In fact, in the movie Wall Street, there is a pivotal scene where Michael Douglas' Gordon Gekko character tried to buy the airline that his protégé's father worked for. Gekko figured out that he could buy annuities so that all the workers would have secure pensions and keep the rest of the money in the pension fund for himself. A lot of corporate raiders in the 1980's did the same thing.

The companies I worked with got out of the coal business but their workers are still getting the money they were promised. The companies and their unions sat down and developed ideas that helped both sides.

If more companies had done things to protect their employees, they would not be asking the government and bankruptcy courts to bail them out now. Everybody would have been winners.

Those who have devoted their lives to a company need to get what they were promised. There is no reason these loyal workers should be another day older and deeper in debt because of mistakes someone else made.

Don McNay is President of McNay Settlement Group where they want people to have security for their lifetimes. He is a member of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. You can write to him at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it '; document.write( '' ); document.write( addy_text10491 ); document.write( '<\/a>' ); //-->\n This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or read other things he has written at www.donmcnay.com