While I believe (perhaps foolishly) that we retirees who have put in 30 plus years of dedicated service will still have our pensions to draw from, what happens, if many suspect and if WS gets its way, 3M is broken into 4 or 5 or even 6 companies.
Pensions typically get assigned to one entity because managing one pension across multiple companies has a lot of conflicts. So...just looking at what happened when some other companies broke apart. The worst case scenario was when monsanto broke into pieces in the late 1990s. They created a "new" monsanto with no pension liabilities and lumped everything into a "successor to monsantos other businesses" called solutia. Of course, solutia went into bankruptcy protection and then pensioners got lumped into PBGC, a government entity, and people got screwed and lost almost half of their promised pension. Then GM did the same and the new GM screwed non UAW retirees the same way.
Sad to say, I see the same happening here.
Has anyone checked into this?
Note: bankruptcy of a subsidiary assigned the old company's pension won't save your from going to the PBGC fund.
Ps I can see Mike and Monish doing this to "enhance shareholder value" of the HCBG.