Jeff Bezos made one of his first big moves as The Washington Post owner today, announcing big cuts to retirement benefits for the newspaper’s employees.
The Post will slash retirement medical benefits and put a stop to defined-benefit pension payments for non-union employees while implementing a new cash balance plan. The organization will also attempt to implement pension changes for union employees.
The Post, which has details of the retirement benefit changes here, noted that employees hired before 2009 could lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in retirement as a result of the changes.
Here’s how Steven Mufson described the new plans:
The Post will create a new cash balance plan to replace the pensions for nonunion employees and a separate but similar plan for those covered by the union. Those plans provide employees with a lump sum or annuity when they retire. But they do not guarantee a particular level of retirement payments, thus reducing the risk that Bezos would have to add money to the pension if financial markets plunged.
When Bezos bought The Post for $250 million this past October, its existing pension plan was 20 percent overfunded.
Earlier this month, Bezos tapped Politico co-founder Fred Ryan as the new publisher of The Washington Post. Ryan begins on Oct. 1 and takes over for Katharine Weymouth, who was publisher since 2008. The leadership change is significant because Weymouth’s departure ends more than 80 years of leadership from the Graham family, which owned the Post before Bezos bought the publication last year.
