In Reply to: Action Plan for AMIPP posted by Martin Luther on 27 January 2004 at 22:24:11:
MartinL,
This posting is not meant to be defeatist or critical of your plan - if it reads that way it is poorly written.
Suppose your approach had been adopted three years ago. There would have been practical difficulties. A campaign like this needs money, money implies subscriptions, that implies more admin (receipts? home addresses?), and spending the money almost requires a democratic mandate. Overall more admin/effort than running a website and a newsletter. Thus more activists required. There is a big difference between being a private AMIPP supporter (register, tell about the website, maybe write your MP, contribute to the message board) and being a public activist (committing a chunk of your life). (Only 17 people volunteered to be trustees, out of thousands eligible. AMIPP asked for help on website automation in the newsletter and on this message board, with zilch response.) Suppose the practical difficulties were overcome. How would the campaign have gone?
Nobody can answer that, but we do know what the MPs response would have been, because many people did write their MP. (And AMIPP has written five times to MPs we know have registrees in their constituency.) The most usual MP response is, quite reasonably, that they cannot comment while the situation is sub judice with the Ombudsman. Of course the campaign might have influenced IBM (or even the Ombudsman) but it is hard to imagine momentum building with MPs and others like them choosing to stand aside.
When the Ombudsman reports he may say that the intentions of the scheme originators can be ignored by current management, that the value of the bargain promised when past managers wanted our work in return for deferred pay can be ignored by current management, and that trustees can blatantly operate against the interests of members provided they supply some reasoning, however dubious, to suggest they had good intentions. On the other hand he may find there was some maladministration. Assuming this finding of maladministration survives appeals the immediate questions will not be matters of ethics but of legality - the respondent(s) will have transgressed under the regulations. It is the possibility of the Ombudsman finding nothing in favour of the complainants (and this surviving appeals) which leads to ethical considerations. Even if the law allows a corporation to screw scheme members, is it ethical to do so?
Perhaps it is worth noting that the ASW workers, who have run a prominent campaign, are making a morale argument. Trusts are intended to buffer the members from the company but the regulations allowed companies the privilege of drastically under-contributing to the funds, so that company and pensions went down together. The ASW workers acknowledge that the UK regulations did not protect them but argue that since Parliament was responsible for regulations that didn't do the job, Parliament has a morale obligation to do something in compensation.
If AMIPP or others do come to campaigning about what is ethical rather than uncovering the law, I suggest we need to be cautious in assuming that Armonk ethics bear any relation to scheme members' ethics. The average US CEO takes from the company at a rate some 400 times that of the average worker in the company. (Perhaps approaching a thousand times the take of the average retiree). With this sort of disparity, it is hard to imagine any empathy with, and understanding of, scheme members by Armonk. It may well be that Armonk would welcome the image of getting more-for-less at the margins of legality (from ununionised staff and retirees already made use of) since this is what institutional shareholders will welcome.
(Not with trustee hat on)