Bob Price has written up excerpts from an interview with Bankruptcy Judge Robert Drain commenting on various issues in the controversial GM, Delphi, and Hostess bankruptcies. While I disagree with some of Price’s points it seems to me that he is correct in his key observation, which is that although the presence of a collective-bargaining agreement often does matter in bankruptcy, it doesn’t seem like it explains what is going on with respect to the treatment provided to the Delphi salaried employees and smaller unions in Delphi versus the treatment given to the UAW and Steelworkers.
Price has also been closely following the controversy that has been brewing with respect to the decisions in the Delphi bankruptcy case to terminate the pensions of Delphi’s salaried employees (even though they seem to have been almost fully funded) while at the same time diverting $1 billion from the GM bailout funds to top-off the pensions of the UAW (and a few other unions) in the Delphi case (which I wrote about with James Sherk).
Price also has posted an interesting interview with Congressman Bob Turner, who has been trying to get to the bottom of how the decision was made to terminate the pensions of the Delphi salaried employees and the role of the Obama Administration’s task force in making the decision (which appears to have been larger than originally thought).