Date: 2002-07-24
Speaker: GEORGE MILLER (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: California

Mr. Chairman. I thank the gentleman from Vermont for yielding .me this time. and I thank him for bringing this amendment. This amendment just addresses a very fundamental question: When will the corporations of America stop raiding the pensions of their workers? If one listens to the gentleman from Texas . the suggestion is that corporations will only go to a defined benefit plan or they will only go to a cash balance plan if they think they can continue to raid the cash balance of the pension plan. What they. promise their workers they will give them is different than what they will give them. And how do they do that? Because they are down working with the Department of Labor. with the Department of Treasury trying to concoct a means by which they can have unrealistic assumptions about the rates of return and then use that to gyp the workers out of their money. E 1245 This is not just the gentleman from Vermont who says this. this is not just me who says this. This is what the Inspector General found as they have audited these plans. We find out that the workers are underpaid. Now. we have been through Enron. we have been through Dynergy. we have been through Merck. and we have been through one scandal after another. What is interesting is that these are many of the same companies that not only killed their workers 401(k) plans. but now they are also in the process of looting the cash balance plans. So the question is: Is this Congress going to put a stop to it? Is it going to tell the Treasury Department that they should be able to do as they have been doing and making realistic assumptions about rates of return on these plans. or are they going to engage in some kind of fiction and cooking of the books with the very corporations that have destroyed families across this country? This is a moment of truth for the Congrest. Because the Treasury and the IRS have been doing it one way. it has been upheld in court. it is determined to be fair to the workers. it is determined to return to them the value of the cash out of their pension plan. and now. in come the companies. In come the companies. who have destroyed the stock market. who have destroyed confidence in the American investment system. who have destroyed these peoples lives. and now they want us to become their partner in depriving people of tens of millions of dollars that they are owed. that they worked for. and that they were promised. Now maybe promising somebody something and keeping the promise was oldfashioned in the 1990s. but I have a sneaking suspicion that it is coming back into vogue. that it is going to be a basic value. These companies promised these workers this pension for the work thAt they did. and when they changed plans. they promised them that they would have a balance. that it was the equivalent of the cash balance of that. Now they want to cook the books. The question for this Congress is: Are we going to be part of that? The Sanders amendment gives us an opportunity to say no. to say no to age discrimination and to say no to having this Congress and the Treasury Department and the Labor Department be partners in cooking the books. We must pass the Sanders amendment.