This happened in the company I worked for many years ago, long before Obamacare.
In this case it was due to the declining fortunes of a 100 year old company being destroyed by NAFTA. A few years later the company went out of business and many thousands of American jobs just evaporated.
We found out that it is perfectly legal for a company to promise a retirement benefit your whole working life then end it the week before you retire.
There are also a myriad of cases where companies have altered retirement medical benefits long after retirement.
Which highlights the difference between legal and moral.
It's a crying shame though. I have known a fair amount of decent, hardworking family people who traded a better salary for good benefits. I think those people are fading as good benefits are going the way of the dinosaur. What you're seeing now among the younger versions of the benny chasers are folks who are not taking better jobs when the lower paying one they've got now is seeimingly more secure.
Yup, it's a depression out there.
“We found out that it is perfectly legal for a company to promise a retirement benefit your whole working life then end it the week before you retire.”
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In ‘82 I left a job with a company I had worked for for just over ten years. I left because they were in receivership and they wanted me to relocate hundreds of miles from my current location. I refused and took a job with a division that the company had sold off a few months earlier and after a few more months I started my own little business. A year or so later they notified me that the retirement plan in which I was “fully vested” was being closed out and a new one started. Those who met some unstated arbitrary length of service under the plan were to keep their vested plan and file for retirement when they reached the qualifying age. Those who, like me, fell below the unstated length of service were to be given an immediate lump sum payout and would have no further benefits. With ten years I got just over $1200. dollars! That amounted to about five cents for every hour I had worked for the company. A coworker who had worked 26 years for the company got a letter telling him that he could draw his expected retirement benefit when he reached the age to qualify. He developed cancer in his fifties and contacted the company to tell them he was dying and asked if he could draw some kind of lump sum settlement. He was told that he could not do so and there would be ZERO benefits for his survivors! In other words my little lump sum for ten years was infinitely larger than his zero for 26 years.