UAW, Obama, follow the money...

[WhiskeyGirl]

Automakers transfer retiree health benefits

Responsibility for these benefits now rests with a UAW-appointed trust, and some health plans are gone.

As part of collective bargaining agreements reached in 2007, Ford agreed to pay $13.6 billion, GM agreed to contribute $32 billion and Chrysler pledged $8.8 billion to the VEBA.

All three automakers won a special exemption last year during bailout negotiations with the U.S. Treasury Dept. that allowed them to use company shares, along with cash, to fund the VEBA. Ford announced Dec. 31, 2009, that it had transferred assets and prepaid some debt to the VEBA.

Where is the money coming from?  I think it would have been cheaper to let them go through standard bankruptcy.

http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2010/01/18/bise0118.htm




"Nonunion Delphi Retired Employees Get Shaft in Auto Bailout"

...Case in point: the roughly 15,000 nonunion retirees of auto parts manufacturer and former GM subsidiary Delphi Corporation on the verge of losing their pension, health insurance and life insurance benefits. These people are getting a first-hand lesson in the drawbacks of not being politically connected. That's something members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) and other auto industry-related unions don't have to worry about.

"GM and Chrysler are now wards of Obama administration "car czar" Ron Bloom and his immediate boss, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner..."

But few are reeling quite in the way like nonunion retirees of Delphi Corporation. The Troy, Michigan-based Delphi, with nearly 150,000 employees worldwide and $18.1 billion in revenues for 2008, had been a parts division within General Motors until it was spun off as a separate publicly-held firm in 1999. The reorganization didn't stave off a meltdown. Delphi went into bankruptcy in October 2005, driven by high benefit commitments and revelations of accounting irregularities. And while the company climbed out of bankruptcy four years later, its pension plans remains well underfunded, so much so that this past July the company terminated its employee pension plans, sticking the federal government's Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) with a long-range tab now estimated at $6.7 billion. But the pain isn't being shared equally - far from it. While some union retirees have been shortchanged, it is the firm's nonunion salaried former workers who are being singled out as expendable.

The future of non-union America?
 

Under the agreement with the government, General Motors will cover an estimated $4.3 billion pension shortfall for wage-earning union workers who had been with Delphi as of 1999, yet it will not have to do likewise with the $2.5 billion pension deficit for Delphi's nonunion salaried retirees. Nor will Delphi itself provide health or life insurance coverage to those workers. Thus, some 15,000 former administrators, purchasing managers, engineers, bookkeepers and other white-collar employees, many with the company for decades, are being hung out to dry. "We have been discriminated against overtly by our federal government, which chose winners and losers between the union and nonunion individuals," notes Den Black, interim chairman of the Delphi Salaried Retirees Association.

Why aren't the union and non-union folks being treated the same?  Why are taxpayers getting stuck with the bill?

http://www.nlpc.org/stories/2009/12/31/federal-takeover-gm-shafts-nonunion-delphi-employees

Working Americans get the shaft?  No Medicare, Medicaid, private insurance?  No Social Security?  How much more money will the union get?

Bondholders didn't have a union...