Time passes, and retirees from DOE’s Oak Ridge facilities continue to watch their buying power erode, with no hint that they will ever see another pension increase.
This whole community is hurting as a result, since the people who are being denied an increase are solid citizens who are now less likely to be able to purchase goods in local stores, invest in upkeep of their homes, or otherwise contribute to the local economy.
In a recent column in the Knoxville News Sentinel, Dub Shults (a retired scientist who served as a division director at ORNL) compiled some of the facts:
He is better off than many. He says: “I retired at the end of 1994 after 43 years of company service. Since that time, my pension has increased by 4.3 percent while the cost of living has increased by 41.2 percent. All things being considered, my purchasing power today is 65 percent of what it was when I retired in 1994.”
“The [retirees'] request is for an increase in the pension of each retiree, effectively restoring approximately 75 percent of the purchasing power that each retiree has lost during retirement.”
If pensions were adjusted, “Anderson and Roane counties would accrue 51 percent of the financial benefits of the requested adjustment in pensions… In terms of dollars, the adjustment would bring approximately $65 million in increased pensions into our area.”
“Sufficient funds exist in trust to cover the expense of the requested pension adjustment without additional funding and without jeopardizing the liabilities of the pension program. Indeed, the trust is over-funded to such an extent that payments into it were stopped in 1984.”
A recurrent topic of discussion in Oak Ridge is the economy — and what should or could be done to improve local tax revenues.
There are plenty of ideas, of course, but it seems to me that the single most positive thing that could and should be done is to gain fairer treatment for the retirees of the contractors that operate the local Department of Energy (originally Atomic Energy Commission) facilities.
People who devoted their working lives to the local atomic energy facilities during the Cold War (and their surviving spouses) have been watching the purchasing power of their pensions dwindle away. Meanwhile, the pension fund that pays them enjoys a huge surplus (the balance is $800 million more than the actuaries say is needed to pay all current and future obligations to past and future retirees) and their former employers have not paid one cent into the pension fund since 1984, but Department of Energy officials have said publicly that it would be irresponsible to increase Oak Ridge retirees’ pensions to compensate for inflation.
Retirees aren’t asking for much — they only want their pensions increased to provide 75% of the buying power they retired with, and to make the “surviving spouse” pension arrangement for past retirees the same as it is for future retirees. As the retirees have been eloquently (and patiently) pointing out in various public forums (for example, in this Oak Ridger guest column that Joanne Gailar wrote last year), these changes would restore a modicum of fairness and would provide a windfall for individual retirees — and the communities where they live.
Our Oak Ridge contractor retirees must be treated better. Although it ought to be in DOE’s and the contractors’ best interest to do so (who would want to be recruited to work for an organization that treats its pensioners so poorly?), it appears that a political resolution is necessary.
I hope something happens soon — for our local retirees and for the local economy. The matter appears under “other issues” on the City’s State and Federal Legislative Agenda for 2007, but I think it might be the single most important federal issue for Oak Ridge right now. (What does the rest of the community think?)
