Business
exclusive

20-something Buffett protégé freezes paint firm pensions

It’s not just the temperatures that have dipped below freezing at Benjamin Moore headquarters.

The 130-year-old paint brand, struggling under the ownership of billionaire Warren Buffett, told employees at its Montvale, NJ, offices last week it has frozen their pension plans, even as it continues to fire workers, as first reported on nypost.com.

The lumps of holiday coal come courtesy of Buffett’s 29-year-old financial assistant, Tracy Britt Cool, whom he installed last year as chairman of Benjamin Moore after taking the rare step of firing a former CEO.

“Tracy is remaking the company into her own image — a kid’s image,” one former exec said of the Harvard-educated number-cruncher. “She’s eliminating all the incentives for company veterans to stay so she can hire a bunch of kids to replace them on the cheap.”

Reps of both Benjamin Moore and Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett’s investing conglomerate, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The paint legend’s decades-old pension plan — which as of last year, according to sources, was in arrears to the tune of $85 million — will be frozen Feb. 1, the company told employees in a Dec. 13 memo obtained by The Post.

“This change more closely aligns the program with our business objectives and trends that exist in the marketplace today,” executive vice president Talia Griep wrote in the memo.

Meanwhile, the company is moving to lay off more than 50 members, or about half, of its IT department and to outsource the division to an India-based vendor, sources said.

“They’re laying them off in waves in the spring, and they’re being forced [now] to train the people that are going to replace them,” one source lamented. “This is the new culture.”

To be sure, several insiders admit the pension plan and in-house IT department are relics of the 20th century. Belt-tightening will be necessary to compete against faster-growing rivals like Sherwin-Williams.

Still, the staffing cuts follow years of inattention to the company’s tech systems, some noted.

Benjamin Moore decided to outsource IT after determining that updating it in-house would cost $125 million, according to a person briefed on the situation.

“The whole department was antiquated, and that’s because it had been neglected for years,” a former exec said. “The only thing people at the top spent money on was enriching themselves and paying that dividend to Warren Buffett.”

Insult added to injury this week when employees read news reports that Buffett’s net worth this year soared by an average of $37 million a day as shares of Berkshire Hathaway jumped more than 25 percent.

Employees likewise had bristled in October when Buffett bragged on CNBC that the paint company “is making a lot of money” despite reports in these pages of chaos at the company.

“That’s not what they’re telling us come payday,” said one miffed worker.