August 29, 2010
Dear Anna Phior, we 12,000 retirees and families frpm the plants in Oak Ridge, TN., have been cheated out of much of our retirement pay these last twenty years:
Please consider many of these people like myself woeked 35 and 40 years with a promise from the Fed., Gov., that if we worked all those years to keep our country strong and free, money would be given to the contractor that operated the plants to pay our pensions. In many of the atomic plants around the country, the workers were treated with honor for honorable service and given cost of living raises ... not so for the retirees from the plants in Oak Ridge starting in about 1990. Our cost of living stopped in 1990 except for one half of one cost of living in about the year 2000.....................
To ad insult to injury, we have been cheated at a time the contractor has more than $3 Billion dollars in an account to have been paying us ... like the other people in other parts of the country who were paid. They say something to the effect, "The money is needed to pay future retirees", but considering that, they still have about a hundred and fifty million dollars from which they could/can be paying us. Not only have we been cheated, but the entire area has been cheated out of the money that would have been passed along to the tax rolls and the entire area around Knoxville, and Oak Ridge, would have benifited and many people who have been left to poverty should have been among the middle class of the area.
Nice lady, in some ways we are like the walking wounded (I myself served in the Korean War as did many others who are being cheated in our old age.) This fund has been moved around from place to place, making it harder for us to get our money ... it is now under the labor department if I'm not mistaken. Some years ago a lady came down from Washington and told a large group of perhaps a thousand, "You will not be paid!"
Since that time, we've had a change of people in Washington, and I and thousands of others hope a better standard of honesty now prevails and we can at last get our money. I think it will speak to the nation that a new standard of caring for those who serve the nation in a time of need will not be forgotten in our old age!
TL Dishman