Shocker: UAW Pensioners At GM Get All Their Money, Other Employees Not So Much

But I’m sure politics had nothing to do with the arrangement. Whoever heard of unions and politicians colluding to line one another’s pockets?
Sounds like a fairytale to me.

Welcome to the General Motors bailout, part three—or is it four, or five? It’s hard to keep up, but this week the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation took over the pension liabilities of Delphi, the auto-parts spinoff of GM that has been working its way through Chapter 11 since 2005. As with the previous taxpayer rescues, this one includes a special favor for the United Auto Workers.
Under the agreement, the PBGC will assume some $6.2 billion in pension liabilities from Delphi, including both hourly and salaried employees. That’s the second biggest pension bailout in PBGC history, and it takes billions of liabilities off the books for GM. As Delphi’s former parent, GM had agreed to take responsibility for billions of dollars of Delphi’s pension obligations to its hourly employees.
It will be months before Delphi employees know what percentage of their expected pension they’ll receive, but not all pensioners are created equal in this arrangement. UAW employees will have their pensions made whole by GM, which insists it is merely fulfilling its end of a deal made with the UAW in 1999 (when it spun off Delphi) to cover any future pension shortfall. Few such obligations usually survive bankruptcy, but, nah, we’re sure politics had nothing to do with it.

On a related note, anyone else getting the idea that Obama’s plan for success at GM, or at least his plan to make the bailout of GM (and Chrysler) look like a success, will be to keep massing all of the company’s liabilities onto the shoulders of the taxpayer until the books balance again?
Of course, that will add more debt to the federal budget, but what’s a few billion more in debt for the taxpayers when it means keeping an entire industry alive as a host body for the unions?
Cozy arrangement, no? The unions work to get liberals elected. The elected liberals then essentially nationalize the companies that have contracts with the unions. The companies are then managed by the liberals in government for the profit of the unions and the unions keep those liberals in office with political efforts funded by said profits.
Everyone wins, right?
Except the taxpayers, of course.