In Reply to: Re: Flexible Benefits posted by EMP on 27 October 2005 at 12:40:11:
EMP,
Were you told what the plan was for the compensation due from giving up the four times salary cover (which you nowadays get as part of the payment for your work) and having just two times cover in part return for your work? If the plan was to increase that compensation each year also, in response to the market value of the lost x2, then the people who needed x4 cover would not suffer.
Naturally IBM cannot guarantee the future - who knows what a change of CEO or unexpected disruptions of the economy might bring - but that does not mean IBM can honourably ask you to decide on a deal without telling you what its intentions are.
(That approach of not telling you intentions may not even be allowable - nobody is allowed to sell a financial product on a prospectus of "Give me your money and then I will decide what to do with it".)
Surely you are not telling us that IBM wants you to sign up but won't tell you enough of its intentions to allow working out what the deal will mean to you if IBM follows it's current intentions? It is inconceivable that IBM does not know its own intentions for the future - they will have been the subject of careful financial modelling of what the deal means to IBM.
Where is the UK Forum in all this? We could debate whether the Forum can do anything in making decisions right but it is surely where employees can expect to get an unspun account of what has been decided. Where is that account?
(Not with trustee hat on)