The tip of the iceberg

The bad news is I don't 

have a pension.

That's also the good news.

There's trouble coming, and it ain't just at GE.

General Electric freezing pension plan for 20,000 U.S. employees

This is the tip of the iceberg: 

General Electric announced it will freeze the pensions of 20,000 U.S. salaried workers, a measure designed to reduce its pension deficit and trim debt. The move will shave GE's pension deficit by as much as $8 billion and its net debt by as much as $6 billion.

As part of the pension freeze, the industrial conglomerate said it will freeze supplementary pension benefits for approximately 700 employees who became executives before 2011. Supplemental pension plans are typically designed for higher-ranking employees and offer benefits beyond the typical pension plan.

"Returning GE to a position of strength has required us to make several difficult decisions, and today's decision to freeze the pension is no exception," said Kevin Cox, chief human resources officer at GE.

As part of such efforts, the company said last month it would spend $5 billion to pay down debt. But the effort to reduce debt could also damage employee morale at a time when CEO H. Lawrence Culp Jr. is trying to turn around the troubled conglomerate.

"The impact on employee engagement/morale of some of these pension measures is unlikely to be positive, but in a situation of 'corporate battlefield surgery,' this tends to be a typical, if unfortunate casualty," noted Barclay's analyst Julian Mitchell in a Monday research note.

Culp, a turnaround specialist, was paid more than $15.3 million last year, or 345 times the 2018 median GE employee wage of around $43,500, according to Equilar.