Congress Spend Tax Dollars To Buy Union Votes

Senator Bob Casey (D-PA) introduced a new bill that would set up a taxpayer bailout of underfunded, multiemployer union pension plans.  Casey recently introduced the latest in Orwellian-named Democratic bills the Create Jobs and Save Benefits Act of 2010.

Multiemployer plans were designed to let union members move from union job to union job and keep the same pension plan. But if a company participating in the plan as part of its collective bargaining agreement were to go bankrupt, the other participating companies in the plan are forced to fully fund these Cadillac union pensions.

The vested members with no participating company are called orphans. Casey’s bill seeks to partition out these orphaned union members, putting taxpayers on the hook for their full retirement benefit funding. Democrats plan to federalize pensions while bailing out their union supporters who’ve botched funding pensions for their rank-and-file members.

Democrats are not content with a one-time bailout of these failed multiemployer pension plans. Now, Casey’s bill would make a line item on the federal budget through the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) to fund these union pension bailouts annually.

At a recent Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP) hearing, Charles Jeszeck, an acting director at the Government Accountability Office (GAO), said that union multiemployer pension plans are in deep financial trouble.  Jeszeck testified at the hearing that unless union membership grows exponentially, the multiemployer pension funds are headed for collapse.

One of the largest of these multiemployer funds, Central States Funds, is in such bad shape that UPS paid $6 billion in penalties to extricate itself from employee participation in the fund.

The Casey bill seeks to bailout and then to expand participation in these defined benefits plans that give unions control over the funds, as opposed to a defined contribution plan such as a 401(k) where employers contribute and individuals control their own retirement investments.

Further, union members are indentured to their unions, unable to accept other work at the risk of forfeiting these pension benefits outright.

If a union knows that if they drive a company into bankruptcy, which they clearly have a talent for doing, they can still say to those union members that taxpayers will cover your full retirement bill, removing further incentives for a union to work productively with an employer, Brett McMahon of the Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC), a national trade association said.

This is one more attempt by the Democrats to buy union votes.  They seem to have no concern for how much their schemes costs.  Over $3 trillion dollars of deficit in16 months and they keep coming up with more spend us into poverty plans.

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