House Republicans Want Investigation Into Preferential Treatment Given To Union Workers
When the Obama administration took over General Motors and guided the company through super extra special bankruptcy proceedings – the sort that kept the crippling labor contracts GM has with the United Auto Workers union in place – they slashed benefits for non-union workers even as union workers got kept theirs.
Now House Republicans want an investigation into why that happened.
(Daily Caller) — 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.
“This is a terrible injustice. This is a political decision, not a legal or financial decision,” Turner said in a phone interview with TheDC. “There were people who were penalized and people were chosen as winners and losers. The White House, the administration and the Auto Task Force (ATF) decided who were going to receive their pensions and who were not.”
The answer, of course, is simple. The Obama administration funded the union pensions, at the expense of the non-union workers, because organized labor lavishes political money on Democrats.
It’s an incestuous cycle. Democrats do everything they can to expand the unionized labor force, and in return they reap a windfall of political money paid for by the dues of all those union workers (whether the workers want their dues going to Democrats or not).
Tags: bailouts, Barack Obama, tim geithner, unions
