GE retirees protesting slashed health benefits

March 30--Nearly 30 workers and retirees of the Bloomington General Electric plant were buffeted by shifting winds Tuesday afternoon as they stood before their former place of employment to protest their diminishing retirement benefits.

General Electric's retirees' most recent strife isn't another round of layoffs that have reduced the local number of unionized workers from more than 3,000 in the 1990s to around 300 today. It isn't the threat of closure in favor of cheaper labor in Mexico, and it isn't an uncertain future surrounding contract negotiations with a new, foreign owner. Those situations remain, but the most recent concern for the retirees is a matter of life and death: a significant reduction in company-sponsored health care benefits.

"He said he'd be dead in three months if he retires, so he's just hanging on."

The story Rodney Ira tells of a colleague who still works at the plant may be true for thousands of GE employees looking to retire across the nation. Ira, who worked at GE for 42 years, retired just three weeks ago with nothing but a handful of what he and other protesters consider broken promises. Litigation in federal court cases pits a group of nine unions that form the Coordinated Bargaining Committee of GE Unions, plus representative individuals, against GE. Each case details the different programs the company has cut or reduced -- a pensioner's prescription, medical care, hospital indemnity, hospital Medicare insurance plans and more.

The lawsuits claim GE violated federal retirement laws and neglected its fiduciary responsibility to its former employees by terminating those negotiated benefits. Instead of the host of programs designed to supplement a retiree's Medicare, the company has canceled eligibility for those 65 and older and began offering nonunion workers coverage from a private insurance marketplace called OneExchange. The deal gives participants a $1,000 reimbursement account and a pharmacy assistance fund. That's a deal Steven Norman doesn't support.

"You can bet, whatever it is, you're not going to like it," said Norman, the former five-time union president of the local International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 2249.

Norman, who retired about five years ago, worked at the plant for 37 years. In the time since Jan. 1, when benefits were cut, Norman claims to have seen his medical and life insurance coverage cut from more than $100,000 to nearly $20,000. It's a reduction in coverage that follows a reduction in work. According to Ira, the company has been using unemployment funds to string workers along until a sale -- to what was originally Swedish appliance giant Electrolux and is now the world's biggest home appliance maker, Haier Group -- comes through.

Ira said for the past three years, the company has maintained operations at a level that is just enough to keep employees working six days a week every other week. Today's price reduction efforts are the reverberations of attempts made to combat a $65 million deficit in 1999 at a time when Norman took over bargaining discussions as the local union president. The time for bargaining long past, Norman talks about his current protest attempts with some pride, viewing himself as a thorn in GE's side.

According to Ira and Norman, Tuesday's rally was the first result of a Facebook group of GE retirees in which many have voiced their complaints. Norman said the rally, which lasted from about noon to 1 p.m., has inspired groups across the nation. He said there's a mass, national protest set for April 29.

"This is the first one we know of in the nation," said Norman, noting that the majority of rally attendees were around 65 years old. "Our international representative was excited when he found out we were putting one together."

GE retiree Ruth Whitt brandished a sign stating, "GE lied 2 me 4 45 yrs" Tuesday, while pacing the sidewalk in front of the plant on North Curry Pike. Since her retirement last year, she's had to look for work elsewhere to pay for what she calls "astronomical premiums and co-pays." She claims that her dental coverage is gone, and the cost of her vision coverage has increased at a time when she's scheduled to have her second knee surgery. It's a medical expense she'll have to worry about in addition to surgery for two bulging discs in her back, sciatica pain and a husband on the heart transplant list who will remain home alone as she works to pay for it all.

"When I was hired in the 1970s, they assured me during my orientation that if I was a loyal employee, I would maintain the same insurance until the day I died," she said.

It's a promise she says she heard when product lines were shipped to Mexico in the '90s and again in 2008, when news of the company's sale broke.

"It's not fair. I was misled and I was lied to," she said. "I was a good, faithful employee. I wouldn't have been there for 45 years if I wasn't."

In an email from GE Appliances spokeswoman Kim Freeman, a prepared statement outlining GE's position on retiree health care stated that it stopped offering its "post-65 retiree health care plans to former production employees or those who were paid on an hourly or nonexempt basis, or their spouse or same-sex domestic partners" on Jan. 1 of this year. This change is consistent, the email said, with changes made previously to health care plans for former salaried employees.

GE is currently offering support to retirees to help them enroll in the offered plan that best fits their needs. In the email, Freeman said GE will provide eligible participants support through a Retiree Reimbursement Account to help pay for plan premiums and eligible medical expenses, as well as a Pharmacy Assistance Fund aimed at helping offset "catastrophic" drug expenses.

"These changes were made after thoughtful consideration and are consistent with national trends in employer-sponsored post-65 retiree health plans," Freeman wrote in Tuesday's email. "GE believes that the private insurance marketplace combined with the company's plan for support is a responsible means to address post-65 retiree health needs."

Despite the accommodations, Tuesday's protesters battled against the changes as they fought to have their medical issues -- and those plaguing their families -- fully addressed.

"This all started about two to three months ago," Ira said. "And as these people have started to have questions about their health problems, it has really started to sink in."

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