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Panel to hear testimony on Delphi pensions
and Burton Speakman
WASHINGTON, D.C.
A congressional subcommittee hearing today could provide insight into why retired Delphi salaried workers, including 1,500 in the Mahoning Valley, saw their pensions and other retirement benefits slashed.
The U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform’s Subcommittee will hear testimony from former auto czar Ron Bloom and former auto task force members Matthew Feldman and Harry Wilson about how decisions were made regarding the pensions of former Delphi salaried employees.
The key for the former Delphi employees is learning the Treasury Department’s role in the decisions, said Bruce Gump, vice chairman of the Delphi Salaried Retirees and a retired Delphi senior engineer.
The hearing will bring people who were directly involved in the decision-making together and ask them why some employees groups were treated differently, Gump said.
“They may be able to justify what happened. They say they can, we believe they can’t,” he said.
Gump said his expectation is those witnesses from the auto task force will either attempt to not answer questions or will use their right not to incriminate themselves under the Fifth Amendment.
Delphi eliminated the pensions of both hourly and salaried retirees in 2009. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., an agency that serves as the federal government’s pension insurer, stepped in and provided reduced pensions.
The hourly retirees, largely United Auto Workers members, were fully covered when General Motors, which received a bailout from the federal government, agreed to step in and make up the difference in their pensions.
Meanwhile, salaried employees had their health-care coverage and life insurance eliminated and had cuts to their pensions of 30 percent to 70 percent, Gump said.
President Barack Obama’s administration made sure UAW members were treated well, Gump said.
“We were roadkill,” he said. “They assumed we were all just a bunch of Republicans.”
The treatment of the Delphi salaried retirees has become an issue in the presidential election.
Though Obama, a Democrat, has touted his federal bailout of GM and Chrysler, retired Delphi salaried workers and Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, dispute that.
“The president’s declaration of victory on the auto bailout is premature,” said Christopher Maloney, a Romney spokesman.
“To this day, dealerships remain shuttered, billions of dollars remain owed to taxpayers and tens of thousands of Delphi retirees have had their pensions slashed,” he said. “The Obama administration’s stonewalling on how they picked winners and losers with Americans’ tax dollars proves they possess no easy explanation for their failed economic policies, special-interest handouts and broken promises.”
Jessica Kershaw, an Obama campaign spokeswoman, said: “The president’s bold decision to rescue the American auto industry helped save more than a million American jobs during a period of economic crisis. Without it, our domestic-auto industry would have disappeared, Delphi might have been liquidated, and all of its employees would have lost their jobs.”
It comes as no surprise that Romney, “ a corporate buyout specialist who has made his millions off the backs of the middle class,” is “trying to use the Delphi workers to try and score cheap political points, but it is disappointing,” Kershaw said.
“Corporate bankruptcies are tragic, and often lead to the loss of pension benefits,” she said, but the PBGC handled Delphi’s salaried pension “according to its standard procedure and the law.”
Also, Kershaw said the nonpartisan U.S. General Accountability Office “determined that these decisions were not made by the administration and for Mitt Romney to politicize the situation at Delphi is political pandering at its worst.”
U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly of Butler, Pa., R-3rd, who represents most of Mercer County and is a subcommittee member said he hopes the witnesses “will be forthright in their testimony and offer insight into this particular element of the GM bailout that has the appearance of political favoritism written all over it.”
Kelly said there “many questions left unanswered about” GM’s decision to subsidize Delphi’s hourly pensions, which has cost taxpayers around $1 billion.
“Taxpayers have a right to know why their money was directed toward some people and not others,” he said. “The evident unfairness of this decision deserves congressional scrutiny.”
Area politicians have been very helpful through the process, Gump said. Thus far, there have been more than five hearings before various congressional hearings about the Delphi salaried retirees issue.
“But we’ve found that hearings aren’t worth anything unless somebody follows up on the information,” Gump said.