Terminating or freezing a pension plan can evoke an enormous amount of emotion in employees as evidenced in this article–“HAL bankruptcy trustee kicked off plane by pilot“:
A Hawaiian Airlines pilot asked [a] bankruptcy trustee . . to get off a plane preparing for takeoff Thursday, saying he was angry about [the trustee’s] policies and could not safely fly the Boeing 767-300 with the trustee aboard. . . Hawaiian, which filed for bankruptcy in March 2003, is overdue in making $4.5 million worth of payments to the pilots’ pension plan. [The trustee] has proposed several options for handling the plan, including terminating it, converting it to a defined-contribution plan or freezing it and protecting the earned benefits. . .
According to the article, the pilot remarked that it was “strictly a matter of safety” and that he didn’t feel that he could function properly with the bankruptcy trustee on board.