Lucent / Nokia Retirees Chapter

To: Lucent / Nokia Retirees       August 26, 2019

Lucent retirees who signed below are current NRLN leaders who have agreed to form a new Lucent / Nokia NRLN Chapter to be effective later this year. The NRLN will continue to collaborate with the existing LRO board and support their previously announced dissolving of the LRO in 2020.

Your Chapter will have a website, email capability, and we will post relevant Lucent / Nokia Chapter news, company news and contact information. Chapter leaders will confer with Nokia management if needed, the NRLN FOCUS newsletter will be posted online; contributors without online access will get a FOCUS by mail. You will receive our Action Alerts on important matters to address with your U.S. Representative and Senators, and at times with the President. You will also receive other emails to keep you informed on retirement issues.

The Chapter will operate under the same model and rules currently governing the Prudential and General Motors chapters and startup chapters like the DuPont and TVA Chapters. Visit the NRLN homepage at www.nlrn.org and click the Chapter tab on the taskbar to see a list of current Chapters.

What the NRLN Lucent / Nokia Chapter Will Initially Work on for You

Protecting Your Life Insurance Benefit: LRO President Joe Dombrowski and the LRO board have worked hard to get Nokia management to fund our life insurance trust that will be depleted in about four years. The LRO and NRLN are advocating amendments to the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) and Internal Revenue Code (IRC) Section 420 to allow employers like Nokia to use a portion of the plan’s surplus assets to fund life insurance and healthcare benefits. The NRLN will work to get these amendments approved before this situation becomes a personal crisis. You may be asked to help by sending NRLN Action Alert messages to elected members of congress in your state.

Protecting Life Insurance and Healthcare Benefits from a Nokia Insolvency: Should Nokia become insolvent they may voluntarily terminate our pension plan and buy annuity contracts which would replace but protect pension income. However, under current law they also may terminate healthcare PPO insurance and or eventually life insurance benefits and remaining pension plan surplus (minus excise taxes) may be taken to pay operating expenses in order to avoid bankruptcy. We all remember similar circumstances when Lucent cancelled the Death Benefit and then used over a billion dollars of life insurance trust funds to avoid bankruptcy before merging with Alcatel. The NRLN will develop and lobby for proposed statute changes that would require using remaining surplus to continue paying healthcare and life insurance benefits as a priority.

Protecting Social Security and Medicare for Future Generations: NRLN proposals would protect benefits of both programs by reducing wrong and improper Medicare and Medicaid payments of $90 billion a year and Social Security by cost cuts and raising the taxable earnings limits up to $400,000 over several years.

Protecting Your Medicare Advantage Plan: The CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) uses taxpayer subsidies to fund Medicare Advantage plans to move Medicare toward privatization, shifting more costs to seniors. NRLN advocates that should privatization happen that Medicare Advantage HMO plan participants be “grandfathered” from reductions in benefits, guaranteed the protection of baked in subsidies, low or no premiums, deductibles and copays. Nokia’s PPO plan provides more benefits than HMO MA plans.

Lobby to Reduce What You Pay for Prescription Drugs: The NRLN is lobbying for bills in Congress that would allow importation of safe and less expensive drugs from Canada, would remove the prohibition on Medicare competitive bidding and end pay-for-delay and other brand drug makers’ tactics to delay or prevent cheaper generic drugs from coming to market.

Financial Support for the Chapter: The NRLN is 80% sustained by individual member annual contributions. We will ask for an initial Chapter startup contribution this fall and hope you will financially support your new NRLN Lucent / Nokia Chapter. Annual contributors will receive a Chapter membership card.

Contact us or update your email address at: https://www.nrln.org/LUCENT/.

PENSION STATUS REPORT

In May, you should have received from Nokia the Annual Funding Notice (AFN) reporting the status of your pension that they are required to send you each year on April 30. In this status report we will provide some comments on the data in the AFN and also on the information Nokia reported to the SEC earlier this year. The current data in the two documents will probably be the last new current pension status data for this year.