Date: 2004-09-08
Speaker: GEORGE MILLER (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: California

Mr. Chairman. I rise to offer an amendment to better protect the pension benefits of millions of Americans. Workers retirement security has been taking it on the chin for the last 4 years. First. tens of thousands of workers and retirees lost their retirement savings after the Enron and WorldCom debacles. Then the Bush administration tried to restart the cash balance conversions and cut the pensions of millions of older workers. Under that proposal millions of older workers would have seen their pensicn benefits cut up to in half. and they would have had no way to return and repair the amount of money that they were planning to retire on. And now we. find out that thousands of pension plans are. in fact. underfunded. and many are considering the termination and the dumping of billions of dollars of l:.ability on the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. the agency that ensures the workers of this countrys pensions. The Pension Benefits Guaranty Corporation has gone from a $7 billion surplus to a $10 billion deficit in just 2 years. The GAO has it on its watch list of highrisk agencies. And a handful of airlines. including United. Delta. and US Air. may soon dump more liabilities on the Pension Benefits Guaranty Corporation that reach as high as $30 billion. One of the worst parts of this is that the workers have no idea that their pension funds are underfunded and at risk. that their employer could default on their pension promises. Let me say that again. That while these plans are underfunded. and while they are at risk. the workers are not informed of that information. Pension law requires underfunded pension plans to report their underfunding to the government. but not to the workers. My amendment is simple. I prohibit the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation from enforcing the part of the law that prohibits them from disclosing to workers and to retirees the funding status of their pension plan. After all. this is their money. This is money that they have contributed to those pension plans. It is money that they are planning on for their retirement. It is money that they are planning on for their future. and it is money that they cannot replace if they are an older worker. They ought to have this information. Most interesting is the fact that the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation wants to make this information public. The Bush administration has said that they support making it public. But this provision in the law prevents them from doing this. There is no reason why the government should know the status of company pension plans. but the workers should not. Workers are losing more and more each day under the administrations proposals on pension. Their jobs ate being outsourced overseas. Their wages are falling. They have no protection of an adequate minimum wage. They are either losing their health care benefits or paying more in copays and deductibles and more of their wages on skyrocketing health insurance premiums. and they are losing their retirement security. We have got to be able to provide them this information. This is very analogous to the workers at the Enron Corporation. The corporation knew that their 401(K) plans were in serious jeopardy. The corporation officers were unloading the stock because they knew they could not continue that criminal enterprise that they were engaged in in ripping off the energy consumers of this Nation. They unloaded. They got out. They took care of their golden parachutes. But the workers lost their 401(K) plans. In this Congress we listened to the testimony of these workers as they talked about their entire retirement being destroyed. workers who were 60 years old. 65 years old. who had worked 10 and 15 and 20 years. who were planning to retire. no way to replace those savings. And now we see. and now we see. that there are hundreds of corporations that are underfunding. in fact. over 1.000 corporations that are underfunded according to the law in their pension plans. but this information is disclosed only to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation and not to this. Why am I here with this amendment on the floor? Because I have requested the chairman of the committee to ask to make this information public. and he has refused to do so. If he would do that. the law provides that it would be made available to the Members of Congress. At least we could start to see some of this information. But that will not be done. The fact of the matter is this. and it is very simple: The workers in these corporations paid into these pensions. The corporations contributed to these pensions. The workersgave up other benefits to get these pensions. That money belongs to the workers. The workers ought to have the information.