AMR Offers Employess Relief To Freeze Pension

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published

It has been widely assumed the AMR, parent of American Air, would try to terminate employee pension plans as part of its Chapter 11 process. The company has indicated it needs to cut costs by hundreds of millions of dollars a year to remain viable. AMR plans to cut as many has 13,000 people

Now, AMR has suggested that it will freeze rather than eliminate pension plans–a deal which would save the retirement nest eggs of thousands of workers.

According to Reuters:

“Freezing the defined benefit pension plans would mean that employees would retain the full value of benefits accrued for service prior to the date the plan is frozen,” said Jeff Brundage, AMR’s senior vice president of human Resources, in a letter to employees.

“Freezing instead of terminating these plans of course would mean we will have significantly larger pension costs than contemplated in our business plan,” Brundage said.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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