How does the SIU pension work? How much time do you need to put in and how much do you end up getting? Do you get lifetime medical also? And same questions for the MMP and MEBA pensions.
The documents can be downloaded from the SIU website. Seafarers.org
[QUOTE=KPEngineer;88874]The documents can be downloaded from the SIU website. Seafarers.org[/QUOTE]
It’s complicated:
http://www.mebaplans.org/PDFFiles/medpenpresent.pdf
I have my own health insurance, plus I have the VA.
You must be prudent, when you retire the goodies of a Union may not be what you need. When you are active, at least in the MEBA, all bases are covered. Retirement is a different equation.
For SIU…you work 20 years…Mike Sacco gets half your pension
That sounds about right! And you can’t work anywhere else (even outside SIU contracted companies) to supplement your pension with out SIU permission.
That is 20 years of sea time with the SIU.
AMO pension is working itself over to a 401K,
MEBA’s is still a defined benefit but not as sweet at it used to be. 2% of base for each year of 240 days of covered employment/year. Covered employment is seatime and vacation. Plus Money Purchase benefit, that’s anywhere from a few % of base up to 15% of base.
[QUOTE=RetiredSteamCE;88923]That is 20 years of sea time with the SIU.[/QUOTE]
That’s true for the deep sea contracts. I worked inland contracts that had 1 1/2 for 1 and 2 for 1 contributions to the pension plan. The pension is wage related for inland division. If you acumulate 7300 pension credited days, you can take early normal at 55.
I worked mostly equal time for 24 years and had more than 7300 credit days at 55. Where I screwed up was waiting until I was 56 to pull the plug.
With MEBA pension you have to pay 11.7% of your total W-2s…2% for the first 20 years…2.66% for every year after 20…highest 10 consecutive earning years
I only know about the SIU pension that the guys in the crew tell me. I have had many guys learning after being on the ships for 25 years they still need a couple more years of sea time for a pension. They all loved to point out the SIU’s spin on the pension, “a supplement to Social Security” . We were a low paying ship and the pensions received from many years of service weren’t very good. A supplement to Social Security.
Now MEBA, up until the beginning of 2012 I could tell you just about anything. The big difference between MEBA and any of the other sea going unions is the MEBA pension is fully funded, actually slightly over funded. The 11.7% of the total W-2 is the money needed to keep the fund fully funded. The companies make NO pension contribution to the fund, haven’t for about 25 years. MEBA pension was so over funded that the Feds were threatening action if MEBA didn’t do something about the over funding. They raised benefits to members.
Anyone that earned pension credits before 2012 will get paid at the old rates, only time credited now is at the lower rate.
AMO’s pension is another story, to get a good idea just how they screwed that fund up, needs to go and read the AMO newspapers from 2008-2010 time frames, they were all available on the AMO web site. They go into some detail just how poorly funded the defined benefit fund had become and what they planned on doing to make it whole. The AMO fund was down to having less than 50% of the money needed to pay all obligations, they were RED. Read the newspaper, everything they did was to make sure the past and present Union officials continued to get the annuity payments they had been getting or were suppose to get. I know AMO has reduced payments to surviving spouses receiving an annuity payment.
The good old days, boom ships to South America, coal boats to Amsterdam, the Med run on a Lykes Brothers(60 days in Alex waiting to discharge), Farrell lines to Australia for McDonalds and BK’s burgers. When was the last American cargo ship that called in Tahiti or Pago Pago or Tasmania.
The SIU pension is fully funded. When I started sailing on SIU tugs, there were a couple of ex-deepsea guys I sailed with. They told me that for years they only sailed enough each year to maintain their insurance. I think it was 125 days. One said he woke up one day and realized he was approaching 60, then started saling 6 to 9 months a year with 1 1/2 pension contributions on the tugs.