This money would pay benefits for the retired workers of the three U.S. companies.
And that is without counting companies' promises to provide health care to employees and retired workers.
Such programs, known as defined-benefit plans, pay retired workers a monthly stipend as long as they live.
GM, for instance, has 2.4 pensioners for every employee, and Ford's retired workers also outnumber present employees.
Promises to retired workers, including pensions and health care, will weigh more heavily than they do now.
Medicare, the national health program for retired workers, is in far worse shape.
Last week General Motors joined the line of revisionists with an announcement that it will cap health-care spending by its retired workers.
The union's leader, Ron Gettelfinger, said that payments of billions of dollars into health-care funds for retired workers, due to be made by 2010, could be delayed.
Blending fiction with documentary, interviewing several retired workers and scripting faux interviews with other characters, he brings huge stretches of long-repressed history to life on an intimate scale.
After that, assuming city tax revenues have grown 3% a year in the interim, Philadelphia would have to spend 19% of total tax revenue just to pay its retired workers.
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They also funnel money into investment, rather than consumption, as PAYGO plans do, which, by making the economy more productive, can help ease the burden of paying for retired workers.
Retirees do better than the cap sometimes: Money left over from a pension fund's holdings after PBGC has seen that all of the insured have been paid goes to retired workers.
Despite the union-busting charges, Chung is known for creating a positive environment for employees, allowing them to wear jeans and t-shirts to work and setting up college funds for the children of retired workers.
Just a few examples: Divorced and never-married women are three times more likely to be poor in old age than married women, and more than one-third of retired workers and widows get benefits that fall below the poverty level.
The government plans to sell about one-fifth of its 61% stake in GM, and the United Auto Workers union, which owns about 10% through a health care trust for retired workers, also plans to unload some of its shares.
Now GM is taking a close look at 350, 000 dependents claimed by 215, 000 current and retired union workers.
The legal fight could decide whether financial commitments to retired public workers are sacrosanct, as many employees have long assumed.
Ten percent of tax revenue now goes to retired public workers, which Raimondo projects will grow to 20 percent in the next decade.
At the same time, a socially desirable earlier change to the pension system has meant that millions of poor retired farm workers have begun to receive income-support payments, at a cost this year of about 10 billion reais.
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And the baby boomers are living longer, creating an imbalance between workers and retired.
Most of these workers are retired and in their sixties and seventies.
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This offers over 400 competing private plans to almost 9m people active and retired members of Congress and their staff, and active and retired federal and postal workers and their families.
Ford Motor said Friday it will offer 90, 000 of its retired engineers and office workers the option to accept a lump sum payment now and to forgo their regular monthly pension checks for the rest of their lives.
Pension schemes, both public and private, will take a drubbing as fewer workers contribute and more retired people draw out money.
For years, government officials and private companies told workers that once they retired, a gold watch and a pension for life would be waiting on them.
Indeed, with ever fewer workers to support a ballooning retired population, there is pressure to increase, not cut, labor taxes.
The offer is separate from a previously announced pension buyout option for current salaried workers who have not yet retired.
Many of the workers who lost their jobs either retired or are still looking for new jobs.
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