For more detailed information about your individual benefits, retirees can access the Hewitt
web site (Hewett took over "
IN Touch Center"Operation) at:
http://resources.hewitt
.com/verizon

Welcome to the Association of BellTel Retirees Inc. advocating for more than 220,000 Bell Atlantic, NYNEX, GTE, MCI and VERIZON Union and Management retirees unfairly treated by the company they helped build. The Association also represents active employees regarding retiree issues, such as cash balance plan conversions and recently announced termination of management pension and healthcare benefits. 

Many retirees from throughout corporate America have been set adrift by their former employers. The 110,000 members of the Association of BellTel Retirees have banded together to fight such corporate and executive arrogance and lack of respect for the retiree and active employee body. We believe that with all retirees acting together we can achieve a COLA on our pension and through congressional action guarantee our healthcare benefits which have been chiseled away over the last 20 years with passage of H1322.

Your Association is actively attacking current management excesses with any means at our disposal. In the last 4 years we have had record Proxy votes victories which has gotten Verizon's attention.  Then this year we won another Proxy which should give shareholders a say in executive compensation. These wins (5 total) also sent a message to the Verizon Executives that their shareholders do care about how they reward themselves.  It also shows to all those who voted their shares with us that we are now a clear majority of shareowners and can change the way our corporate executives behave if we have a common goal and work together.

Click Keep Me Posted on left side of this page to get regular email updates of interest to Bell System retirees. Also we will notify you of late breaking news about Social Security, Medicare and other actions on the political scene. 

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In March of 2006, individual members of your Association's Board of Directors formed ProtectSeniors.Org with an ABTR founding grant. ProtectSeniors.Org is a separate lobbying organization, set up, specifically to lobby Congress for the passage of the HR1322 (The Emergency Retiree Health Benefits Protection Act.)  The Association of BellTel Retirees, as a nonprofit charitable organization, is not allowed by the IRS to spend more than 20% of it's budget on lobbying.

By supporting ProtectSeniors.Org, we have a strong, dedicated professional group of BellTel Volunteers and experienced paid lobbyists currently working on one and only one issue: Passage of HR 1322 into law. They recently hired another Capitol Hill and senior rights veteran Laura Howard to help with Seniors Communications, coalition building and maintaining the automated "Write to Congress" system.

When HR1322 becomes law, it will guarantee continuance of your subsidized healthcare and give back money and services previously taken away.  Part of our current objective, and it should be yours too, is to educate Congress and the Main Stream Media to the fact that removal of this "earned" benefit from retirees, constitutes a multi-billion dollar theft by corporate America. A theft of not a "promised gift," but an earned benefit no different than your pension! Yes, one which retirees EARNED by working 20, 30 or 40 years or more at less pay and fewer vacation days than we could have earned elsewhere.

Never allow any Radio/TV commentator or other news media person get away with saying something like this: "Corporate retirees are lucky their company still offers this gift." Or "Corporation X can't afford this benevolent "welfare" benefit for retirees anymore."

You, as a retiree, EARNED your healthcare benefit! It is not a gift! Call or write the offending media source and give them the facts. Tell them, how every year you worked, you were given an update of what your healthcare and other benefits in retirement were worth. During all your years of service you were constantly reminded by upper level management that your retirement benefits package was a real sweet deal. They always pulled this out when you were considering quitting. After all, it was a known fact at all levels of the Corporation, that this company would always take care of their retirees... How things have changed.

See details of the progress towards passage of HR1322 at the ProtectSeniors.Org website.

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