MLIVE: McDonald Rivet Helps Restart Push To Restore Pensions of Delphi Salaried Retirees

FLINT, MI -- A new bill to restore the pensions of more than 21,000 Delphi salaried retirees is back on the agenda in Congress, and a group representing those former workers says the latest effort “affords us the best chance ever of achieving success.”

Introduced this month, the Susan Muffley Act of 2025 would restore workers’ monthly pension benefits and provide a lump sum payment and interest for past losses.

The bill has been referred to the House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce, and the Committee on Ways and Means.

It was cosponsored by U.S. Rep. Kristen McDonald Rivet, D-Bay City.

Similar bills have stalled previously in past sessions of Congress.

McDonald-Rivet said in a news release that more than 5,800 of the retirees are in Michigan.

Thousands of others worked at plants in Ohio and Indiana, according to Flint Journal files.

“When you contribute to a pension with every single paycheck, you count on it being there when you retire. Thousands of Delphi retirees have been robbed of the retirement they earned. It is unacceptable,” McDonald Rivet said in a statement released by her office.

“I will continue the longstanding fight to restore for Delphi employees the retirement they earned with Republicans and Democrats,” the congresswoman said.

Delphi, a former subsidiary of GM, declared bankruptcy in October 2005, and announced plans to close or sell 21 of its 29 U.S. plants by Jan. 1, 2008.

Before the closings, the company operated facilities in both Flint and Saginaw in the 8th Congressional District.

Former U.S. Rep. Dan Kildee, D-Flint Twp., previously helped push past versions of the Muffley Act, which was named for Susan Muffley, a leader of the Delphi Salaried Retiree Association.

Backers of the bill have said that despite several warning signs, Muffley, who died in 2012 after complications from cancer, avoided seeing a doctor because of financial burdens after she and her husband lost their pensions.

The DSRA says on its website that prospects for the new bill “appear encouragingly different in 2025.”

“We are encouraged and determined to continue the fight to restore Delphi salaried retirees’ traditionally well-funded pension plan,” the statement says.

GM spun off Delphi in 1999 -- a decade before its own bankruptcy and bailout by the federal government.

After its bankruptcy, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation assumed responsibility for the Delphi retirees’ pension plan, but it cut monthly benefits if they were larger than the statutory maximum benefit that the agency was guaranteed to pay, cutting some pensions by as much as 70%.

Unlike its union workers, GM did not assume pension liabilities for the Delphi unit’s salaried workers.

Congress took up the cause of the retirees in 2022 after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear their case against the PBGC, the U.S. Treasury Department, and the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry.

“Working as hard as I did for as long as I did, sometimes going weeks without a day off, I should have the retirement so many working Michiganders dream of,” Al Gerwin of Saginaw Township said in a statement released by McDonald Rivet’s office this week.

“But because my pension was cut by over 30% and my benefits were ripped away, things are much harder than they should be. At this point, I just want to be able to leave something for my kids,” Gerwin said.