Continuing to Fight to Restore Our Pensions in 2025
- Details
- Last Updated: Wednesday, 25 December 2024 20:01
- Published: Tuesday, 24 December 2024 09:00
Our fight to restore the full pensions of all Delphi salaried retirees continues into 2025. Having concluded meetings with our congressional advocates, we believe that the new political landscape in Washington in 2025 affords us the best chance ever of achieving success, although we still have an uphill fight.
Some of our staunch supporters departed from Congress at the end of 2024 — We are most appreciative of the support and efforts of Rep. Dan Kildee (D-MI), Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), and Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN). We almost achieved passage, but they simply couldn’t overcome the circumstances that blocked us. Things appear encouragingly different in 2025. We are encouraged and determined to continue the fight to restore Delphi salaried retirees’ traditionally well-funded pension plan.
The facts are that the Delphi salaried pension plan was wrongly terminated in 2009 solely because the Federal Government chose to interject itself into the General Motors (GM) bankruptcy process. In an unprecedented circumstance, the Government chose to invest $50 billion of taxpayer money to purchase GM — pundits nicknamed the new company "Government Motors." However, our employer, auto parts-maker Delphi Corporation — GM's biggest supplier — was nearing the end of a several year effort to restructure, taking many difficult steps to jettison unprofitable business lines in order to compete. What was left was a strong company that drew the attention of several potential investors.
Delphi's timetable for exiting bankruptcy did not align with the Government's 40-day timetable for GM's emergence from bankruptcy — So, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) abandoned its earlier efforts to preserve Delphi's traditionally well-funded pension plan for salaried employees and took over the pension plan in mid-2009 without seeking Federal Court approval. Delphi's savvy bankruptcy lenders from Wall Street then quickly bought Delphi out of bankruptcy, and true to their nature, reaped huge profits just a few years later by selling off Delphi's remaining, strong business lines to other companies — while leaving Delphi salaried retirees with drastically reduced pensions.
The federal government broke a viable pension plan that would be paying full benefits to Delphi salaried retirees today IF government had not created this unique and unprecedented termination:
Government broke it – it's the government's responsibility to fix it.
We look forward to working with the legislative supporters we gained last year to carry us forward in the new Congress to the full restoration of the pensions that we earned.
In June 2009, Watson Wyatt reported its analysis of the Delphi Salaried Pension Plan and summarized that "based on the valuation results that will be shown in the actuarial valuation report to determine funding requirements for the plan for the year beginning October 1, 2008, we have determined the 2008 AFTAP to be 85.62% as developed in the attached exhibit. The 2007 AFTAP was 86.9%."