mr. chairman , i yield myself 2 minutes . 
mr. chairman , i join the gentlewoman from illinois ( ms. schakowsky ) xz4003600 and the gentleman from new york ( mr. crowley ) xz4000870 to offer an amendment which will be the first time that will allow congress , and perhaps the last time , to save the hard-earned retirement benefits of 120 , 000 workers and retirees at united airlines . 
unfortunately , united airlines has become a poster child for what is wrong with the private pension in this country . 
united filed for bankruptcy over 2 years ago and forced one wage concession after another from its workers , and then it unilaterally decided that it would stop making the legally required pension contributions to its plans . 
it dragged on the negotiations with its employees and then , in the middle of the night , got up from those negotiations and dumped those retirement plans into the pbgc , causing those employees to lose somewhere from 30 to 60 percent of their retirement nest egg , of their retirement assets , of their future standard of living . 
that is what these people lost because united decided it would no longer negotiate to try to find a solution to this problem . 
we see delta airlines that has frozen its pension plan , has asked to stretch out its payments so that it can protect the assets of its employees . 
united chose another idea : it would simply dump these liabilities onto the taxpayers of the united states of america . 
what united was not telling anybody was the truth . 
they were not telling them about their funding of their pension plans , about their liabilities of their pension plans . 
they simply decided they would terminate these plans in the pbgc . 
so this is our chance . 
this is our chance to try to save the retirement nest eggs of the flight attendants , of the ramp workers , of the pilots , of all of the people that have given so much to have this airline continue to fly . 
we held an e-hearing . 
over 2 , 000 people participated and told us what the real impact of these cuts would be on their families , on their children , on spouses with illnesses , on their parents . 
people who had worked 30 , 35 , 40 years for this company now find out that they have been terminated with no chance to go back . 
this amendment says united airlines has got to go back to the bargaining table and work out a provision to take care of this . 
mr. chairman , i reserve the balance of my time . 
