Kodak asks Judge to cancel retiree medical benefits

[BrianShaw]

Interesting. In my employment we have been reminded several times in the past few years that we are "at will employees"... we have a job at the will of the management. Implied, no so subtley, is that we can be terminated for anything at any time.

 

[Photo Engineer]

Kodak, until recent years, was very paternalistic. You had a job with EK for life until the layoffs started in the 80s. Of course there were firings and layoffs, but these were minor compared to the big ones that started in 1988. And that was the first layoff to reach the Research Labs.

PE

 

[Sal Santamaura]

...I'm trying to retire and can't even find anyone to fill my shoes. There are all kinds of acquired skill sets had to be learned through years of actual experience. I'm lucky to work for a family corporation rather than a publicly-traded one...The only commodity career I know out there is an MBA...

Therein lies the key -- it's a privately held company that doesn't serve Wall Street. You're fortunate indeed. Were it publicly traded, regardless of the skill sets you've needed to learn, management would find a replacement for you (the "commodity") somewhere in the world. It wouldn't matter whether the person or persons hired could fill your shoes. By the time they ran everything you've built into the ground, management would have been promoted and/or moved on.

 

[Sal Santamaura]

When we went to work for Kodak, we signed a contract that outlined our NDA obligations and Kodak's obligations in therms of "valuable consideration" in return for our work. Valuable consideration was outlined in terms of pay, retirement and medical benefits. Over the years, all of this changed as Kodak changed...

It's likely that much of the change was attributable not only to Kodak changing, but to the Employee Retirement Security Act (ERISA) of 1974. See a history of ERISA here:

http://www.dol.gov/ebsa/aboutebsa/history.html​

With respect to medical coverage, it was ERISA that primarily drove the many disclosures about plan termination possibility that started being made to employees of corporations.