Robyn E. Blumner
By Robyn E. Blumner,
St. Petersburg Times Columnist
Let’s be frank. There are contracts and then there are contracts. Those retention bonus contracts held by American International Group executives in its financial products division were apparently inviolate. No matter how many smart lawyers Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner consulted, the contracts were bulletproof, and a default could lead to punitive damages.
Then there are the kind of employment contracts that most of the rest of us have. They’re not explicitly spelled out in a sign-on-the-dotted-line kind of way, and there are certainly many fewer zeros, but they are promises made in exchange for one’s labor nonetheless. The difference is that these “contracts” are eminently fluid and disposable.
Here’s the employment contract we all had in mind when joining the work force: Work hard, be loyal and in exchange you can expect job security, steady income gains, health insurance and a dignified retirement.
But those ideas are so nostalgic today as to be naive. MORE
First Published in the St. Petersburg Times Sunday, March 29, 2009
April 1st, 2009 at 1:06 pm
Thoughts from a Michgan friend who has several GM/UAW retirees in the family: Do Geithner and Obama recognize the urgency of addressing this immediately? Failure to do so is likely also to guarantee the collapse of the present system of heath care provision for most of American consumers. Medicaid, Medicare, and large employer/union-won health plans with retiree components are the three-legged stool on which medical care sits in the U.S. and if even one leg breaks, the whole thing falls. Not that that system –which skims an obscene amount of the money moving between patient/payor and provider/ payee into the hands of the insurance/ banking/investment management cartels which have failed us so badly recently — doesn’t deserve to die, but the replacement needs to be a lot more developed than it is at present if huge suffering is to be avoided.