Thousands of workers at U.S. Sugar thought they were getting a good deal when the company shelved their pension plan and gave them stock for their retirement instead. They had a heady sense of controlling their own destiny as they became the company?s biggest shareholders, Vic McCorvey, a former farm manager there, said. Now that many U.S. Sugar workers are reaching retirement age, though, the company has been cashing them out of the retirement plan at a much lower price than they could have received. What has happened at U.S. Sugar could happen at many other companies because of a type of retirement plan that proliferated in the 1980s, after powerful members of Congress took an interest in ?worker ownership? as a way to improve productivity.
See "In Stock Plan, Employees See Stacked Deck", Mary Williams Walsh, The New York Times, May 28, 2008