Robbing Pension Funds to Feed Corporate Profits

Jan 5, 2026

Over the last decade, hundreds of companies, including Alcoa Corp., AT&T and Lockheed Martin Corp., have sold their pension plans to life insurance companies owned by giant financial companies.

The financial companies gaining control of these pension funds, including Apollo, Carlyle, Blackstone, Brookfield and KKR, are truly predatory. They buy up companies, load them up with debt, carry out sweeping layoffs, and take the profits off the top. After they bought up hospitals and health care companies, death rates spiked. After they bought up big swaths of the housing market, homelessness skyrocketed. After they took over for-profit colleges aimed at working people trying to further their education and training, these companies provided little education but loaded the students up with debt.

These companies also loan money at very high interest rates to companies with low credit ratings. They bundle those subprime loans together, claim that they are high quality, and resell them at a tidy profit.

Now these predators and scam artists have accumulated over 700 billion dollars in pension fund money, money they are using to boost their profits even further. For them, gaining control of corporate pension funds is a no-lose proposition. They keep all the profits. As for the losses, it is the retirees who pay the price, as much of the money they live off of is cut.

Retirees, fearful that their retirement pensions will soon go up in smoke, have turned to the courts to get their pension funds out of these Wall Street sharks’ control. But one federal court has already thrown out a suit by AT&T retirees. Another court has allowed a retirees’ suit to go forward. But it will still take years, if not decades, for anything to be decided.

No, the courts are not a protection. Odds are that many workers will lose some or all of their benefits, especially when a new economic crisis hits.

This is not the first time that private companies have cheated or scammed their workforce from pension benefits that were supposed to be “guaranteed.” Airline companies, such as American and United, are famous for declaring bankruptcy in order to get out from under all their pension obligations.

In fact, retirement pension benefits were never a gift to workers. Workers had won them through big strikes and other labor struggles in the three decades of economic expansion following World War II.

But retirement pensions never covered more than a minority of the workforce, even at their height. And the companies promised pension benefits only to workers who held onto the same job for decades and decades, thus tying the workers to the company, making the workers feel like they had a stake in how the company performed. In other words, companies promised a decent retirement to pacify their workforce and undercut the very fights that had won the benefit in the first place.

Neither were the traditional retirement pensions a permanent gain. In the 1970s, the period of economic expansion was ended by a grinding economic crisis that has continued to this day. To protect their profits in the teeth of this crisis, companies imposed more and more concessions on the working class. One of the first things to go were full retirement pensions. Companies no longer had the same reason to keep offering full pension benefits, given the waves of mass layoffs and downsizings they have been carrying out ever since.

Today, less than 10% of the private sector workforce still has a traditional pension plan, down from about 32% back in 1975, according to Employment Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) data. And, as we see, even those with pensions are at risk of losing them.

A decent retirement after a lifetime of work should be a basic right for all workers. But the workers cannot count on the capitalists, nor their government, to get it. The workers can only gain it through their own organization, struggles and fights.