Jim Chickneas

This video was submitted courtesy of the Association of BellTel Retirees.

From my perspective, knowing that the benefits were there kept me perhaps more loyal than somebody else would be if they had been faced with the same working conditions that we had been faced with.
The idea of having a stable retirement in my opinion is a much more realistic and more generally useful objective for a worker in the United States to have than the fact that he’s going to get to be in the NBA or become a crack heart surgeon or become the most lucratively paid corporate executive.  Those big rewards -- that winner-take-all mentality, which I think is all too prevalent today -- is harmful to people.  If you had a sense that I’m working because I can make contributions and take care of myself and my family -- and be able to do that after I can’t work, that’s…. I don’t know if that’s an American dream or socialist dream or what it is, but I think, it’s, in my case, it was what kept me going.  I knew I was going to have stable living conditions when I retire. 
If you look at the executive compensation packages, which would have come from “Cloud Cuckoo Land,” (I don’t know who thinks these things are in any way compensatory for what these people do), you’ve got to say, “Well, maybe if they want to keep paying these executives at that level, they gotta steal from the employees in some way, and the retirees are the easiest ones to steal from.”