March 28, 2024

In Korea, Changes in Society and Family Dynamics Drive Rise in Elderly Suicides

Rather than quietly taking her life at home as many South Koreans do, the woman staged her death as a final act of public protest against a society she said had abandoned her. She drank pesticide overnight in front of her city hall after officials stopped her welfare checks, saying they were no longer obligated to support her now that her son-in-law had found work.

“How can you do this to me?” read the suicide note that the police said they had found in a purse next to her body. “A law should serve the people, but it didn’t protect me.”

The woman’s death is part of one of South Korea’s grimmest statistics: the number of people 65 and older committing suicide, which has nearly quadrupled in recent years, making the country’s rate of such deaths among the highest in the developed world. The epidemic is the counterpoint to the nation’s runaway economic success, which has worn away at the Confucian social contract that formed the bedrock of Korean culture for centuries.

That contract was built on the premise that parents would do almost anything to care for their children — in recent times, depleting their life savings to pay for a good education — and then would end their lives in their children’s care. No Social Security system was needed. Nursing homes were rare.

But as South Korea’s hard-charging younger generations joined an exodus from farms to cities in recent decades, or simply found themselves working harder in the hypercompetitive environment that helped drive the nation’s economic miracle, their parents were often left behind. Many elderly people now live out their final years poor, in rural areas with the melancholy feel of ghost towns.

Such social shifts are not uncommon in the industrialized world. But the sudden change has proved especially wrenching in South Korea, where parents view their sacrifices as the equivalent of a pension plan and where those who are suffering are falling victim to changes they themselves helped unleash as they rebuilt the economy from the devastation of the Korean War.

“The family was always an extended self,” said Park Ji-young, a professor of social welfare at Sangji University in Wonju. “Children were everything they had for their future — for health care, financial support and a comfortable life in old age. Their children’s success was their success.”

Making matters harder for the elderly, the government has been caught by surprise by the quick erosion of the traditional family structure.

The government began building a public pension system in 1988, but people say that in most cases the payments barely cover basic living costs, and many of the oldest South Koreans are not covered because they were past working age when the system was created. A government report in 2011 said that only 4 of every 10 people over 65 had a public or private pension or retirement savings.

And as the woman who poisoned herself in August discovered, the law denies welfare to people whose children are deemed capable of supporting them. That leaves some parents the humiliating choice of asking for help from their children or their government, which can grant exemptions if they can prove their children are unwilling or unable to help. In a country that puts great value on retaining face, experts on the elderly say that is a painful choice. Professor Park said some kill themselves because they feel betrayed; others are driven by a fear of harming their family’s chances of getting ahead.

They are succeeding at alarming rates; the suicides among people 65 or older ballooned to 4,378 in 2010, from 1,161 in 2000. The number of suicides among other adults and teenagers also surged, though those deaths are generally attributed to the stress of living in a highly competitive society rather than the changes in the family structure that are driving the elderly to despair.

Until the country’s rapid-fire industrialization in the late 1900s, South Korean life followed a well-trod path. Parents lived with their eldest son’s family — parents without a son often adopted one from a relative, which also continued the male lineage of the family — and sacrifices were rewarded. Historically, towns would erect monuments to their “filial children,” and some rural towns still award prizes, like televisions or cash, to solicitous adult children.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/world/asia/in-korea-changes-in-society-and-family-dynamics-drive-rise-in-elderly-suicides.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Delphi Pension Plan Is Called Unfair to Nonunion Workers

“It is frightening to even think about allowing this precedent to stand,” said Bruce Gump, a retiree of Delphi who lost part of his benefit when the federal government took over Delphi’s pension plan in bankruptcy. Delphi retirees from the United Auto Workers and two other unions, by contrast, got their full benefits, thanks to an unusual side agreement with General Motors, which was honored even as G.M. restructured in bankruptcy that year.

“The United States government chose winners and losers,” Mr. Gump added.

The hearing, by a subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, comes at a time of mounting public frustration over pension rules that cushion some retirees, while others see their benefits shredded. The federal government offers limited pension insurance, but workers at some companies — like contractors to the Department of Energy and N.A.S.A. — turn out to have better pension coverage. Meanwhile, states and municipalities have stayed out of the federal program, leaving their workers at the mercy of increasingly hostile taxpayers.

The question of pension guarantees, and who pays for them, came up shortly after General Motors went into Chapter 11 two years ago with financing from the United States Treasury. Officials from the Obama administration’s Auto Task Force asked G.M. executives how they planned to handle the pensions of a second company, Delphi.

Delphi, once a division of G.M., was still a major supplier in 2009, and was bankrupt itself that summer after struggling to avoid liquidation.

“Have you guys begun a dialogue with the U.A.W. over your desire to see the hourly plan terminated?” Matthew A. Feldman, of the Treasury’s Auto Task Force , asked senior G.M. executives in a message referring to a pension plan at Delphi. G.M. had a role because 10 years earlier, when it was spinning off Delphi, it had promised the auto workers’ union that if their pension fund ever went belly-up at Delphi, they could come back to G.M. to be made whole, through special payments called “top-ups.”

The top-ups would cover the difference between the federal government’s limited pension insurance and each retiree’s full benefit. There is no precedent for any company making such payments until G.M. did.

With G.M. itself bankrupt in 2009 and relying on billions of taxpayer dollars to restructure, honoring the 10-year-old promise “could get messy,” Mr. Feldman warned.

He also expressed uncertainty about whether the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation would permit it. (Pension-related e-mails between Auto Task Force members and G.M. were provided to The New York Times by a person who requested anonymity.)

The pension guaranty corporation, the federal agency that takes over company pension funds in bankruptcy, is supposed to be self-sustaining, but it usually operates with a deficit, and some predict it will one day need a taxpayer bailout. Its officials are wary of companies offering pensions, then sticking the government with the bills. During Delphi’s bankruptcy the agency had been trying to lay claim to some of Delphi’s profitable offshore subsidiaries to cover its cost in taking over Delphi’s pension obligations, estimated at about $6.2 billion.

If G.M. had enough money in bankruptcy to pay top-ups to Delphi’s U.A.W. retirees, then the pension agency could have demanded that G.M. cover some of its costs.

Walter Borst, G.M.’s treasurer at the time, said in a message back to Mr. Feldman of the Treasury that he did not see how the pension agency could throw such a wrench into G.M.’s restructuring. “Our reading of the benefit guarantee is clear, that it’s for the benefit of retirees, and not the P.B.G.C.,” he wrote.

He proved correct. Delphi terminated all of its workers’ pension plans, the pension agency’s provided its limited coverage, and G.M. began paying top-ups to Delphi’s retirees from the U.A.W. and two other unions, much to the anger of nonunion retirees like Mr. Gump. They are receiving money only from the pension agency and not G.M.

Many of them are now struggling, Mr. Gump said in his testimony, adding that the nonunion retirees had also lost their health benefits and were in many cases too young for Medicare, yet too old to find new jobs.

The dispute may foreshadow a similar policy decision that Congress must make in the coming months, over whether to appropriate money to N.A.S.A. to cover the cost of a promise it made in 1996, to top up the pensions of its primary Space Shuttle contractor, United Space Alliance of Houston, if its pension fund ever terminated. Mr. Obama’s budget proposal for fiscal 2012 asks Congress to appropriate about $550 million for that purpose.

The promise is coming due now because the space shuttle program is ending and United Space Alliance will no longer have the revenue needed to cover the cost of the plan. If N.A.S.A. fulfills its promise, the company’s retirees will not be subjected to the pension agency’s insurance limits.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=20dc8d5ec1aa99a945d6065ec5400a79