I hope I can quit working in a few years: A preview of the U.S. without pensions

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31. Yes you can lose a pension if it is not a Defined Benefit Pension insured by

the PBGC. Before Reagan a DB pension was considered a liability and a company couldn't touch the money. But under Reagan
they were changed to an asset. That gave birth to corporate raiders like Wilber Ross.
I have an example of that myself. In 1995 I worked at Wheeling Pittsburgh Steel. We went on strike that year to get a new DB
pension to replace the one we lost during a 1985 bankruptcy. The owner didn't want to give us a DB pension, he said it would cost him $185 million. But after 10 1/2 months strike he agreed to settle. Now he didn't come up with $185 million himself. What he did was
made a hostile takeover of a company called Handy and Harmon. Handy and Harmon had an over funded DB plan. He merged our new plan into theirs. Therefore basically stealing the money that belonged to the employees of Handy and Harmon to give us a pension. It is a long story but Wheeling Pittsburgh Steel liquidated in 2003 but I still receive my pension check from Handy and Harmon Corp.

That is what Wilbur Ross did to make his billions. He bought up troubled steel companies. He came in raided their pensions (legacy
costs), sold off any valuable property and opened the company back up with half the labor costs since they no longer had any legacy costs. Then he flipped the company for a nice little profit. Now we find out he also laundered the money and took it out of the country.