Date: 2003-05-14
Speaker: GEORGE MILLER (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: California

Mr. Speaker. the suggestion again has been made on the other side of the aisle that somehow this would be a burden or somehow this would be complex if we required that workers be treated the same as executives. They do very complex things in the corporate suites. They create various accounts to pay for the pension benefit of executives. They go out and buy various insurance schemes to pay for the benefit of executives. They create special tax treatment. They come to Congress and get special tax treatment for the pension plans of executives. All very complex. But at the end of the day. it means that that executive will know. no matter what happens to that company. that they and their family and their children will be protected forever into the future because It will be outside of the bankruptcy. it will be outside of the corporate failure. So complexity is not a problem when the executives want to protect their income. They have been doing it for years. But somehow now to say that we ought to send notice. send an email to your employees and tell them that the president is selling 100.000 shares. that the President is doing an inside deal on a stock option. send an emaili you send them all day long. there is nothing complex about it. you type it out and push send. it is not complex. But they do not want the enployees to know this. That is why so many people have been trapped in the financial collapse of these companies. In the middle of the negotiations with the flight attendants. the pilots. the machinists. the ramp workers. when American Airlines was asking those people for $2.3 billion in givebacks from their vacation time. from their pay. from their health benefits. give it back to help the company fly. they were secretly. quietly and in a very complex fashion protecting and guaranteeing hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for the executives. and they got caught. Once the light was shined on them. they scrambled like rats for the door. because they knew they could not sustain it. and the CEO resigned and they had to give back the compensation package. and then the flight attendants and others agreed to try to help the company stay out of bankruptcy. That is all this bill does. It says that you ought to know about that when they are negotiating your union contract. what they are doing for the executives. That is why the pension story today is no longer a backpage story. That is why it is on the cover of Fortune Magazine. not exactly a leftwing journal. But Fortune Magazine captured the context when it said oink. the pigs in the suits are jeopardizing your corporation. your compensation and your pension plans. Oink. Earlier. Fortune Magazine asked America. is your retirement at risk. and why? Because of what is going on in terms of corporate financial gimmickry. It is why millions and millions of Americans have left the stock market and why the stock market laments that they have not returned. They do not have confidence in this system. They do not have confidence in this system any longer. They understand it is rigged on Wall Street against them and it is rigged in the Congress of the United States against them. Where do these families go to get justice? Where do these families go to get equity? Where do these families go to get fairness. if they cannot come to the Congress of the United States? So now what we say in the Republica~n bill is we are going to give them additional advice about what to do with their savings. and we are going to give that advice from the very same people that just had an outofcourt settlement of $1.4 billion because they lied to their clients. They had financial arrangements that prevented them from being independent. They had financial arrangements. so they misrepresented how a stock was doing. how a company was doing. because they were getting fees. they were getting commissions. they were getting percentages of deals. Those are the very same people the Republicans say now that Mr. and Mrs. JONES and Mr. and Mrs. Smith ought to go to and trust that they are going to give them independent advice. The Democratic bill says you can go to those people. you can make them available. but you also must make an independent adviser available to these people as they plan for their retirements. When things go wrong for people in their retirement plans. as they did over the last couple of years. and you are 50 or 55 years old. you do not have much chance to make it up. Again. we have all heard from our constituents about people who thought they were goilig to retire a year ago. a year and a half ago. From Pacific Gas and Electric. the Portland company. not the California one. a person came before our committee. the Committee on Education and the Workforce. who had $650.000 in Enron stock. He and his wife bought a small farm that they were going to use to run a care center for retarded children. By the time they got to our committee. he had $6.000 in stock. He is 60 years old. Where does he go to get back his money? Where does he go to get made whole? Well. unless we want that to happen to another generation of workers planning for their retirement. planning for their families. unless we want that to happen again. we have got to support the Democratic substitute. because it is about justice. it is about fairness and it is about getting away from the conflicted advice. from the manipulation. from the dishonesty. from the criminal activity of the financial markets. Mr. Speaker. $7 trillion was lost in the markets. $7 trillion. These are the people who want to take you out of Social Security and put you into that market. Social Security did not lose a dime. Wall Street lost $7 trillion. and hundreds and thousands and millions of Americans had their entire retirement future changed overnight. We thought. well. that is the free enterprise system. That is the market system. But what we find out now every day is. no. like the California energy crisis. that was a manipulated system. that was a dishonest system. that was a criminal system. All the Democratic bill says is give people some notice. give people some rights. give people control over their money so they can escape the ship. The CEOs. the board presidents. the presidents of companies. they are heading for the lifeboats. They do not even have the decency to hit the alarm bell to tell you the ship is going down. We say at least you have to sound the alarm and tell the workers that they may want to jump too. That is the decent thing to do if you care about your workers. if you respect them. if you appreciate what they have done fop the corporations. But that is not what is going on in America today. and that is not what will go on in America under the Republican bill. Mr. Speaker. you must vote for the Democratic substitute if you believe that workers and their families are entitled to the decent protections for their retirement funds. I urge Members to vote for the Democratic substitute.