“I was very loyal and dedicated and responsible,” Miller said. “Delphi workers did our part and we did it well. We were betrayed.”
The bailout of GM has been praised for keeping the American auto industry alive, but Miller and other local Delphi retirees often feel like the forgotten casualties.
Many are working post-retirement jobs, asking their spouses to defer retirement, or even being forced to sell their homes.
Instead of the comfortable retirement she had planned for, Miller feels near-constant stress about finances. She feels guilty she can no longer help her children with their medical benefits or college expenses. “Your kids are still your kids, and you want to help provide the basics,” she said.
The Washington Twp. mother of four will be one of the panelists at today’s Delphi pension field hearing before the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, requested by U.S. Rep. Mike Turner, R-Centerville. The hearing, titled “Delphi Pension Fallout: Federal Government Picked Winners and Losers, So Who Won and Who Lost,” is open to the public and will begin at 9 a.m. in Smith Auditorium at Sinclair Community College. Other panelists will include former Delphi Corporation executives Chuck Cunningham and Steve Gebbia.
Turner’s own father worked for GM for 44 years. “I come from a GM family and this is something that has affected my family personally,” Turner said.
Turner said he agrees with the Delphi Salaried Retirees’ Association that a “clear injustice” has been perpetrated when their benefit cuts are compared with those of GM retirees and Delphi union retirees. In 2009, in the final year of its four-year stay in bankruptcy protection, Delphi ended health and life insurance benefits for salaried retirees and turned pension obligations to the federally backed Pension and Benefit Guaranty Corp., whose stated mission is to protect American pensions. That meant pension cuts of 30 to 70 percent for salaried retirees, including about 700 in the Dayton area. Meanwhile, union pensions and health care benefits have remained untouched. “It’s good everyone else is keeping their benefits and pensions — they earned it,” Miller said. “But we did, too.”
Concurred Turner, “the fact that the administration picked winners and losers doesn’t mean everyone should have lost. I can’t speculate why that has happened.”
In September, Turner sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner reiterating 25 questions he had raised at a June hearing on the issue. “The administration has stonewalled our requests,” Turner said.
Vincent Snowbarger, the PBGC’s deputy director for operations, will be among the panelists. White House spokesman Adam Abrams declined comment.
Turner became involved after Washington Twp. resident Tom Rose, a former plant manager at the Kettering Boulevard Delphi plant, came forward with his concerns. “The reason for the hearing to get on record their concerns and what they see as inappropriate actions of GM and their government,” Turner said.
U.S. Rep. Steve Austria, R-Beavercreek, also has gotten involved, meeting with Delphi salaried retirees last week in Washington. He recently also wrote a letter to Geithner protesting the way the retirees were treated.
Turner said he’s impressed with the organizational ability of the Delphi Salaried Retirees Association: “You can see why the company was successful as long as it was this management team. The Delphi retirees have addressed this in a corporate fashion.”
Rose added: “The hearing is one more step as we try to get the answers that have been denied us. We were working for the same company, in the same situation, yet how can we be treated so distinctly differently? We’re not asking for an entitlement or a handout; we’re asking for the deferred compensation that we earned.”
Rose, 65, suspects Delphi salaried retirees were singled out “because we don’t have the same political clout as the union members. We’re not saying they don’t deserve it, but we do, too.”
Rose worked for GM for 30 years and another nine with Delphi. He and his wife, Jaci, are now paying three times more for their health care — and doing it with 40 percent fewer pension dollars. They’re dipping into their retirement savings much earlier than expected, and Jaci waited extra years before retiring from her job at a frame shop. They haven’t done the kind of traveling they had planned.
They feel lucky compared with other retirees. Their three children are grown; they planned carefully for their future. “The biggest emotion is betrayal,” Rose confessed. “I fielded all those middle-of-the-night calls dealing with a plant problem or an employee problem. And then to have the company turn their backs on us and our own government take part in the decision that we’ll be the losers in this — it’s hard to take.”
Scott Branscum of Englewood feels the same bitterness, yet gratitude at his relative good fortune. He has been able to find another job in the automotive industry, but a short time later his wife, Marge, was diagnosed with a brain tumor. She’s currently taking the medication Avastin at $12,000 every three weeks to keep the tumor from growing. “I feel bad for my new insurance carrier,” Branscum said. “I paid into GM for 30-plus years, and now the new carrier has to pick up hundreds of thousands of dollars in bills.”
He knows that he’s not to blame, however: “People who worked hard and strove for success, shouldn’t have the legs cut out from beneath them in later years.”
A group of salaried retirees are suing the PBGC, the Treasury Department and others who oversaw efforts to pull GM and Delphi from bankruptcy in 2009. “I don’t think anybody expected we would come together in such a rally after what the government decided to do to us,” Branscum said.
Steve Kramer of Kettering, 65, is now working a minimum-wage job to supplement his pension that was reduced by 14 percent. “I feel lucky because if I had been just a few years younger, I would have lost half my pension,” he said. “But I had to delay my plans for travel so I can continue to work. I am very bitter. I won’t walk into a GM dealership.”
Alan Schide, 58, of Springboro said that he and his wife, Karen, were “very conservative and pro-active in our retirement planning. We had no credit card debt. If we hadn’t been very frugal, we might have had to sell our house like a lot of our friends.”
As a result of the benefit cuts, Schide started his own home-repair business, and Karen continued to work past her intended retirement date so they wouldn’t pay a penalty by early withdrawal from their 401K savings. “This was hard not only financially, but mentally,” he said. “I was dedicated and worked hard and truly took ownership and then to have this happen was very hard. I felt like a failure.”
Neal Folck of Miami Twp. has been affected even more severely, forced to rent out his longtime home in Springfield and rent an apartment closer to his new job as a salesman for Lebanon Ford. “The double-edged sword was the loss of my retirement benefits at the same time as the downturn in the economy.”
For her part, Mary Miller always dreamed of doing exactly what she’s doing now — starting her own business, MTM Transformation Coaching, as a life and leadership coach. “My business is growing, and I make a difference every day,” she said.
But she didn’t expect to be forced to retire so early: “I always thought I’d have a second career, but I’d get to pick when I started it. I wouldn’t have picked when my youngest was in high school and my three oldest were in college.”
Still, she thought she could make it work with the safety net of her health benefits and pension. A year later, her health benefits had vanished and her pension had been reduced by 30 percent. When she first retired, she paid $179 a month for health benefits for herself and the four children she raised as a single parent. Now she’s paying $300 for herself alone.
Miller is using her personal and business philosophy to guide her through this difficult period: “Instead of saying ‘Why?’ I ask myself, ‘Where do I go from here?’ That being said, we are looking forward, taking action not backing down. We are asking, ‘How can this be just? How can the government pick winners and losers amongst its own citizens?’ Here we are and we are not whining; we are fighting for what we earned.”
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