Substance abuse can be a killer—literally—for employers in safety-critical industries. So what can they do about it?
There was a time when many workers didn’t have to worry about saving money for retirement. After all, that’s what their DB pension plan was for. Then the pendulum shifted and companies began switching to DC plans, putting more of the responsibility on employees to make investment decisions for their retirement savings.
Age to retirement isn't a good measure of risk tolerance.
Pension plans are the topic du jour, even outside of HR circles. Funding challenges, retirement income adequacy, intergenerational equity and financial stability are only a few of the issues under discussion and in the media. But all talk and little action may be sounding the death knell for these programs. Unless pension plans can evolve relatively quickly to meet changing needs and circumstances, they face extinction.
Thanks to steady growth in the global stock market, the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) closed the 2012/13 fiscal year with an investment return of 13.8%. But long-term funding remains a challenge for CalSTRS, the largest teachers pension fund and second largest public pension fund in the United States.
The 2008 economic crisis and its lasting aftermath have significantly influenced the dynamics of collective bargaining in both the public and private sectors in Canada. As a result, employers are taking a hard look at the long-term sustainability of their DB pension plans and searching for alternatives to the status quo.
Last week, Mark Carney spoke about the state of the global economy in Halifax for the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS). He touched on the situation in Europe, and focused on how an open, resilient financial system can support sustained global growth. He also addressed the need to pay down debt and the too-big-to-fail […]
Consolidation, benefits cuts part of budget.
While plan sponsors across the country are retreating from DB arrangements that are costly to the bottom line in good times—and even more so in economic downturns such as those we’ve faced over the past decade—more and more are looking to DC as an alternative retirement savings option for their employees. According to the 2011 […]
In Herman Hesse’s epic novel Siddhartha, the eponymous protagonist has a revelation one day regarding the river he has grown up beside: “…today he saw one of the river’s secrets, one that gripped his soul. He saw that the water continually flowed and flowed and yet it was always there; it was always the same […]