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PGE Worker to Tell Capitol Hill to Protect Retirement Plans

March 5, 2002

For the fourth time since the fall of Enron, an IBEW member will tell his story to a Congressional committee today.

Dary Ebright, a special tester for Enron-owned Portland General Electric, lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in Enrons swift tumble from new economy corporate giant to the nations largest bankruptcy in history. Enron bought PGE in 1997. Ebright will testify before the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Oversight today. The 2 p.m. hearing, called by the committees ranking minority member Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), will be in Room 1100 in Longworth House Office Building.

"Our people played by the rulesthey werent sophisticated investors, just hard-working, honest folks who became victims of Enrons lies," Ebright planned to say in prepared remarks. "We had members, guided by their faith in a company and its promises, who, in a matter of months, lost everything they spent decades saving for retirement."

Prior to the hearing, Ebright will meet with Rep. Robert Matsui (Calif.), ranking Democrat on the Ways and Means Social Security Subcommittee. That meeting, at 1:15 p.m. in Room 1129 Longworth, will be open to the press.

The Enron fiasco brings into focus the inherent risks in the recent trend away from "defined benefit" retirement plans, the traditional pension plans that protect workers retirement savings in the event of a companys failure. With retirement savings plans like the one Enrons employees had, workers carry the risks of investment rather than secure retirement. Defined contribution plans include 401(k) and profit sharing plans that tie the performance of a retirement fund to the financial performance of the company.

"The message brought to Capitol Hill by our members and others who fell victim to Enrons shameless financial maneuvers is that corporate greed cannot be allowed to run roughshod over the retirement security of honest, hard-working Americans," said IBEW International President Edwin D. Hill. The IBEW leader stressed that the Enron debacle has buttressed the case for maintaining a safe, guaranteed Social Security system as a base for workers to be augmented by private pension plans that offer a defined level of benefits.

"We will seek to convince Congress that the rush to defined contribution plans may have looked good during the stock market bubble of the 1990s," Hill continued. "But in the real world, families cannot plan their retirement security on air. It is time for our nation to encourage a return to defined benefit plans."