The active workers will receive a 2.6 percent or 40 cent an hour annual raise, barely keeping up with the rate of inflation. There will be a slight improvement in pension benefits for older active workers who are preparing to retire. Surviving spouses of steelworkers are limited to collecting pension money for a maximum of five years. After that they are cut off. Many surviving spouses never collect a penny because the company does little to inform them of the limited benefits to which they are entitled.
Pensions are an issue for all steelworkers.
But the situation facing USX workers is particularly striking, because the company's so-called Carnegie Pension Fund is in far better financial shape than the funds run by other steel companies. The principal in the Carnegie Pension Fund keeps going up as the number of participating retirees dwindles. At the beginning of 1999, the latest Pension Fund Report that USX had released was from 1996. This allowed the company to conceal the enormous growth in the fund that must have accrued from the nearly 30 percent annual run-up in the stock market that has occurred every year since 1996. The pension fund which steelworkers have paid into for decades has also regularly been used to boost the company's bottom line.