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April 30, 2008
Floor Statement: Aviation Restructuring
Senator Jay Rockefeller
Mr. President, I rise in support of Senator Durbin's amendment.
The debate is not about an arcane, technical pension funding rule. The issue before us is about whether thousands and thousands of airline employees are allowed to keep hard-earned defined benefit pensions or if we are going to regulate them or throw them out to the underfunded PBGC, which has so much debt that you cannot count the zeros. This issue is about whether we are going to send additional major carriers, who have so far avoided bankruptcy in these brutal financial circumstances, into a downward spiral. My premise is to hold the main carriers harmless. They are up against it, at the cliff. We should hold them harmless.
Adding this pension provision to the FAA bill would defeat the whole purpose of this compromise brokered by the Finance and the Commerce Committees, which was done with the underlying principle that we should hold the commercial airlines harmless during these turbulent economic times, which are expected to last. That is sacred. That is why it would be unwise to load up an additional liability on airlines trying to do the right thing for their employees.
It would be especially wrong to cause that result in a misguided effort to put the preservation of regular order before common sense--in other words, going around a committee. It happens. Airline employees will pay the unnecessary price for this change from current law. It cannot happen.
During these tough times of rising fuel prices and mounting financial losses, this is not the time to impose tougher, unrealistic pension funding requirements upon the airline industry. To do so would risk more bankruptcies and force carriers to dump their pensions into the woebegone PBGC. That would put in danger the economic security of workers who would prefer to stay employed and not have their pensions frozen.
In 2005, when the Senate was considering the Pension Protection Act on the Senate floor, we passed an amendment by voice vote that I cosponsored with Senator Isakson and Senator Lott. The amendment would have given all airline carriers substantial pension relief. The amendment did not pick winners or losers within the airline industry. It is not our business. Rather, it focused on keeping their defined benefit pension plans solvent.
Unfortunately, as Senator Hutchison pointed out, the final product that came out of conference in 2006 limited the pension relief the Senate sought to give all airlines. Led by--and I will say he is gone and I am not sad--the Ways and Means Committee chairman, Bill Thomas, the conference report chose winners and losers. It gave some carriers more pension relief than others, creating a competitive advantage for some carriers.
A number of Senators were not happy with the airline provisions bill, including Senators Durbin, Reid, Obama, Harkin, Menendez, Lautenberg, Bill Nelson, and a lot of the rest of us. They entered a colloquy on the floor arguing that this disparity needed to be dealt with.
That is why in last year's Iraq war supplemental appropriations legislation Dick Durbin did the only thing that he had available to him to do, and with the strong support of Senator Hutchison, he sought to right this wrong and inserted a provision that brought the airlines up to par and gave them the necessary pension relief that they deserved. I understand this was perhaps not the best process. We are not a body known for our meticulous protocol. We are trying to get something in that is lifesaving for the Nation.
As a senior member of the Finance Committee myself, which has jurisdiction of pension legislation, I agree with Senator Baucus that it would have been more ideal to go through the regular order and have the Finance Committee review and vet the provision. The problem is that it wasn't going to happen.
However, airlines need and deserve pension relief. We cannot adopt the pension provision of the Finance Committee tax title and impose higher pension burdens upon five domestic airlines, which has been discussed by various people, during these tougher economic times.
Remember, hold legacy commercial airlines harmless. So we would be turning our backs on American,
In 2005, while we were debating the Isakson-Rockefeller-Lott amendment that brought all airlines equitable pension relief, I stated on the Senate floor that my goal was to protect the employees and retirees who worked so hard to earn retirement benefits, and that remains my goal today.
To deny disadvantaged airlines the relief they rightfully deserve in the Pension Protection Act and which the Senate voted to give them would be unfair.
I have the utmost respect for Senators Baucus and Grassley. They are a superb team. They did their very best and did a very good job on the whole on the Pension Protection Act. But the Finance Committee in the Senate should not have received the dicta of the now thoroughly retired former Ways and Means Committee chairman. The former House majority succeeded with their desperate efforts to achieve questionable policy goals by holding long-awaited pension reform legislation hostage. But that was then and this is now, and we should not give the former House majority the satisfaction of achieving their desired objective over a jurisdictional squabble, and that is all it is. It counts. I understand that. It counts. People lie on the floor to protect it, but in this case, we are dealing with something much larger.
We can do better, and that must begin by us stepping back and invoking the ``do no harm'' principle.
With all of my respect to the Finance Committee leadership, we just cannot do one more thing to jeopardize the health of our domestic aviation industry, particularly the commercial sector. The rest of it is doing very well. For that reason, I will support Senator Durbin's amendment, and I urge my colleagues to do the same.
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