Another U.S. House of Representatives committee is calling for documents in what committee members call the “secret Delphi pension deal.”
Members of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce this week added to the chorus of House committees calling on the U.S. Treasury and the federally backed Pension and Benefit Guaranty Corp.(PBGC) to disclose the “Obama administration’s involvement” in “closed door deals” that led to Delphi non-union retirees losing large percentages of their pensions while retirees represented by the United Auto Workers have seen their pensions protected.
Members of the House Oversight and Government Reform and Ways and Means committees also are looking into the matter. A spokeswoman for Ways and Means told the Dayton Daily News Wednesday that Treasury and the PBGC in recent days delivered an expected group of documents to the committee, and staff members are reviewing the material.
Last November, the Oversight committee held a field hearing on the issue in Dayton.
In 2009, a then-bankrupt Delphi shifted its pension obligations to the PBGC, which usually does not pay full pension amounts. Delphi non-union retirees say they lost 30 to 70 percent of their pensions.
But pensions for retirees who were represented by the UAW had General Motors — which once owned Delphi and itself spent time in bankruptcy in 2009 — “top off” their own pensions, a move the salaried retirees decried because a post-bankruptcy, restructured GM was not obligated to honor past contracts.
The Obama administration has maintained that it had no role in Delphi’s decision to relinquish pensions or the PBGC’s calculations in how much of the pensions to pay.
Nationally, some 20,000 or more Delphi salaried retirees were affected. While no one knows how many Dayton-area Delphi retirees have seen pensions cut, there are more than 800 area members of the Dayton Salaried Retirees Association, which is suing the PBGC in Detroit’s federal court to restore their pensions.
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