Union bosses want taxpayers to foot the cost for bailing out the labor organizations’ many failing pension plans that millions of their members are counting on to “be there” when they retire.

By: Mark Hemingway at Washington Examiner

Anybody who thinks the multiple trillions of federal tax dollars spent by President Obama and the Democratic Congress on the Troubled Assets Relief Program bailouts for Wall Street and the auto industry, the economic stimulus bill, and Obamacare were excessive better get a good grip.

The mother of all taxpayer bailouts is right around the corner.

Union bosses want taxpayers to foot the cost for bailing out the labor organizations’ many failing pension plans that millions of their members are counting on to “be there” when they retire. Unfortunately, the average union pension plan has only enough money to cover 62 percent of its financial obligations.

Such a low level of funding puts those plans on the government’s critical list. Pension plans funded below 80 percent are considered “endangered” by the government. Below 65 percent is “critical.” With union membership declining, that puts these funds into a tailspin from which they’ll likely never pull out.

The government’s Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation only guarantees pensioners $12,000 a year, should their pension plan fail. Good luck retiring on that.

But as the economy sours, there’s increasing pressure to bail out workers from failing unions. Last July, for example, the PBGC agreed to take on $6.2 billion in pension liabilities from bankrupt auto parts manufacturer Delphi. And that’s just one company. In 2007, the PBGC was already running a deficit of nearly a billion dollars. Things will only get worse as the PBGC is expected to assume $86 billion in liabilities by 2015.

Concern over underfunded pensions is the real reason behind nearly every legislative item for which unions are currently agitating. One of the top union priorities is “card check” legislation that would eliminate secret ballots in workplace representation elections, marking a return to the union thuggery of yesteryear. Without secret ballots, unions could identify and bully workers who don’t support recognizing the union.

But unions don’t want card check just so they can organize more workplaces and collect more dues — that’s chump change. They want to organize more workplaces so they can then use mandatory binding arbitration to force more businesses into multiemployer pension plans.

Under “last man standing” accounting rules, if you have five companies in a multiemployer pension plan and four of them go bankrupt, the last company standing has to pay for the pension plans of all five companies.

FULL STORY

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