Romney campaign video falsely implies Mitt wishes more auto workers had kept, not lost, pensions

"Do you think they'll buy the idea I care about these people's pensions?"
(Darren Hauck/Reuters) Mitt Romney has a bizarre new anti-union web video featuring two people whose pensions and retiree health benefits were cut when auto parts manufacturer Delphi dumped its pension on the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. The video is going for a divide and conquer strategy, seeking to whip up anger against the Obama administration because a group of non-union salaried Delphi employees lost retirement benefits while union workers did not. But the big thing that stands out if you place this video against Mitt Romney's position on the auto rescue is that while viewers are supposed to feel terrible about these people who suffered pension reductions, Romney's plan would not have treated them any better. It just would have treated union workers worse.

The video tees off from a statement by Vice President Joe Biden that, while some workers lost pensions in the auto industry restructuring, "The vast majority, because of the federal pension board they have out there to make up differences when companies go under like this, most did fine." According to a GAO report, 55 percent of salaried employees didn't suffer pension cuts. Obviously, though, if you're one of the 45 percent who did lose out, you have reason to be upset, and those workers were caught in an unusual situation.

Instead of all the workers losing out on benefits, G.M. stepped in and "topped up" benefits for union workers. G.M. did this because of an agreement it had reached with the UAW in 1999, when Delphi was in the process of becoming independent from G.M. That's the part that's without precedent. Nothing about employees of a major corporation having their pensions cut dramatically is new or even particularly unusual in this day and age'shoot, it's exactly what happened to GST Steel after it was taken over by Bain'and problems with Delphi's pension had been coming for years. (Read Ellen Schultz's excellent book Retirement Heist to understand some of the many ways companies have plundered and profited from pensions.)

All the soft lighting and mournful music playing over the workers in Romney's video are supposed to make you feel sad for those people. You should. But Mitt Romney doesn't. Through the private sector business experience he touts as his big qualification for the presidency, he created plenty more like them, and today, his real criticism of the auto rescue is not that these people were left with pension cuts but that far more workers'union workers specifically'did not have their pensions cut.