Making Corporations Keep Their Promises to America’s Retirees

http://blog.aflcio.org/2007/09/25/making-corporations-keep-their-promises-to-americas-retirees/

by Mike Hall, Sep 25, 2007

James Robertson spent 33 years working for Bethlehem Steel. He says it wasn’t unusual to punch in at 4:30 a.m. and work 10-hour shifts, six days a week. When it came time to put in for his pension, the retired United Steelworkers (USW) member said, in response to new legislation designed to end corporate bankruptcy abuse, “I was good and ready.”

But his retirement dreams were shattered when the company declared bankruptcy, shedding its promises to provide retiree pension and health care benefits, as has happened to millions of other workers. Says Robertson:

I thought a deal was a deal. Turns out that deal wasn’t worth the paper it was written on.

Robertson’s hard-won pension was slashed by more than one-third, and he lost the health benefits he was counting on to treat a degenerative bone disease, high blood pressure and elevated cholesterol. He asks:

How, in America, can you be promised one thing, count on one thing, for 33 years and then suddenly have it disappear? We worked for those benefits. But the company was allowed to walk all over us as if we didn’t matter. This shouldn’t be allowed to happen.

The new legislation introduced today would change the nation’s bankruptcy laws and ensure that workers and retirees are not the last in line behind banks and businesses, when a company files for bankruptcy. Says AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka:

Today, the bankruptcy system has effectively become a device for the wholesale transfer of wealth from workers to other creditors. Businesses have used it as a backdoor way to slash wages and benefits for current workers and break promises to retirees. Workers have been pushed further and further to the back of the line of those who will be made whole by the companies they have faithfully served.

They are left wondering how to provide health care to their children when a bankruptcy court decides that’s a low priority, or contemplating losing their homes because they are legally required to stay in a job where they now earn half as much.

FULL story at link.

"Protecting Employees and Retirees in Business Bankruptcies" introduced in the U.S. House by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and in the Senate by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.)

Bankruptcy has to be removed from the list of 'ordinary business strategies'. CEOs, COOs, and CFOs shouldn't be walking away rich while the workers that made them so wealthy lose their desperately needed retirement benefits and healthcare coverage.