Favortism: 'Union workers got special treatment when the Obama administration bailed out GM'

House Oversight Committee likely to investigate White House for treating non-union employees worse than unionized after GM bailout

By Matthew Boyle

The Daily Caller

March 7, 2011

Republican Reps. Mike Turner of Ohio and Dan Burton of Indiana are asking House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, California Republican, to dig into the Obama administration’s decision to cut more than 20,000 private-sector workers’ pensions and eliminate their health and life insurance plans during the General Motors (GM) bailout in 2009.

A spokesman for Issa’s committee told The Daily Caller the committee “remains interested” and is “looking forward” to findings from an ongoing Government Accountability Office investigation, which is expected to come out within the next couple of months. What Turner and Burton are saying happened during the GM bailout is that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner decided to cut pensions for salaried non-union employees at Delphi, a GM spinoff, to expedite GM’s emergence from bankruptcy. The problem with that, according to the congressmen, is that Geithner decided to fully fund the pensions of union workers involved in the process – including workers associated with United Auto Workers, Steelworkers and the IUE-CWA.

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US Next? Private Pensions Seized In Europe

Stealing Pensions

Editorial

Investor's Business Daily

January 6, 2011

With similar problems for Social Security looming in 2015, it behooves the U.S. to watch this mess — and to avoid repeating it.

Social Security: Europe is trying to dig out of its budget hole by seizing private pensions. It's a last-ditch effort to preserve socialism at the expense of the very assets that would sustain its future growth.

In Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Ireland and France, big government, a demographic death spiral and weak tax revenues have left fiscal coffers in trouble. Unwilling to stand up to voters — or rioters — most governments have little taste for doing the right thing: cutting their budgets.

So, they're going after pensions to make up for shortfalls. Public and private pensions co-exist in European countries. In some cases, public ones resemble our own Social Security, stressing budgets.

But instead of privatizing pensions, as Chile did in 1980 — which would have turned these obligations into assets — three former stars of European emerging markets have come up with heavy-handed incentives to turn private savings public. It's a step backward.

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