Four years before he retired, Duncan McLean scrawled that date – Feb. 29, 2004 – in red letters on a magnetic pad. Then he slapped it on his refrigerator.
For 1,460 days, each time he went for a glass of milk or a cold beer, that magical date encouraged him onward.
Last year, he retired from United Airlines at the lucky age of 55. The jet-engine mechanic had done his time, lasting 37 years, despite the layoffs and salary cuts that dogged his industry.
And it wasn’t without compromise. He had worked countless hours of overtime to pay the mortgage after his paychecks diminished by 15 percent for six years, starting in 1994 – a trade-off for employee stock options.
He took the cut knowing he had a good pension coming.
Right about now, he had expected to finally savor some peace of mind – load up his truck and travel, with his girlfriend sitting shotgun in the Ford Explorer.
Cruising coastlines and cresting majestic peaks.
And laughing, always laughing.
Instead, United Airlines – struggling to stay alive in a turbulent industry – defaulted on paying for his retirement, and his pension will be taken over by the federal government.
McLean expects his $3,200 monthly benefit to be cut by about 55 percent.
And those stock options he traded for so he would have a little nest egg? Their value shrank from more than $100,000 to about $1,200, he says, thanks to the company’s sorry condition.
But he has not lost everything.
“I’ve still got my tools, my hands and my mind,” McLean says.
Although not too old to go back to work, he is too far along in life to catch up. He’ll never duplicate the financial security he counted on in retirement.
As an empty-nester, McLean had always planned to “bail out” on his four-bedroom Cherry Hills home with its lovely park view.
But not this soon, and not this way.
What really infuriates him, however, is something different.
“You got all these (former United) executives that sat there,” he says. “They’re down in Florida sucking up on their piña coladas, and here we are. We gotta go back to work.”
Investing in his future
The world was much different back in 1966, when he started with United. At age 17, he entered the company’s four-year apprentice program, a rigorous education that required a 40-hour workweek in the jet shop, where he learned everything from overhaul to line maintenance.
After the day shift, he would go off to night classes in aeronautics at the local junior college.
Those were the Vietnam War years, so after McLean received a draft notice, he served as an engine mechanic in the Air Force. After his time was up, he went back to United, again paying his dues – this time taking the dirty job of restoring worn engine parts with a thin spray of molten metal.
“Metal spray was not a real fun thing to do,” he says. “But it was secure.”
So he worked that job for five years. He figured he was investing in his future.
“Back when I was in my 20s and 30s, we knew that auto mechanics were making more money than us,” he says. “But we stayed at the airlines for the benefits. The sacrifice you made was for the benefits. We had a pension, and it was guaranteed.”
He trusted this. And decades later, when United incentives for early retirement promised full medical and pension benefits, he trusted that, too.
“The betrayal is phenomenal,” he says. “You count on this. If they’d said, ‘We might bail on this retirement program,’ then I’d have been sitting there plowing everything I possibly could into the 401(k), and I wouldn’t have retired. But once you retire, you’ve cut the strings, and the strings don’t grow back. So you’re stuck.”
Behind the eight ball
These days, his ballast is black humor. One recent afternoon, he sat in a local Greek restaurant, wearing jeans and a white T-shirt that had a breast pocket emblazoned with an eight ball.
That’s part of his sartorial statement: The pension debacle puts him smack behind the eight ball.
But another emotion glitters on the finger of his right hand. He wears a ring that he proudly had made from the gold pin he received from United on his 35-year anniversary.
“That’s the thing that really blows me away, when the company that wrapped itself around you for years and years,” he says, raising his arms into an embrace, “sits there and says, ‘Oh, well, we’re under new management; screw this.’
“That’s the way they do it. They just walk in to the judge and say, ‘Hey, we want to cancel the pension.’ And the judge says, ‘OK, motor on, boys.”‘
Under that eight-ball shirt, Mc Lean’s slumped shoulders are thin. His mechanic’s muscles have atrophied.
“He’s wasting away,” says his girlfriend, Sherry Carr, an effervescent blond in a straw hat who sits protectively by his side, boosting his spirits with frequent infusions of cheer.
Uncertainty and depression triggered a weight loss of 42 pounds. Recently, he tumbled down the basement stairs while carrying a load of laundry, breaking a shoulder and a wrist.
Then he got a hernia.
“All the time I worked at United, I had very few medical claims, but then I retired and now have thousands of dollars in bills,” says McLean, whose medical insurance requires him to pay 40 percent.
“A check here, a check there,” he says, “and all of a sudden we’re out of money.”
