After two weeks of receiving testimony from witnesses across the country, we have been overwhelmed – both numerically and emotionally – by the response. This e-hearing has been a monumental as well as groundbreaking event. We have received approximately 2,000 emails from United Airlines employees and retirees. And we have heard you loud and clear – the move to terminate your pensions by United Airlines and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) means more than just benefit cuts and recalculations. It means real injuries to countless working families. It means an uncertain future for the families of mechanics, pilots, flight attendants, ramp workers, ticket agents, and others. It means selling homes, coming out of retirement, taking on second jobs, and struggling anew to provide loved one’s with health care or to pay for a child’s college education. Your frustration with the bankruptcy and pension termination process is more than justified.

Representative Jan Schakowsky and I introduced HR 2327 to help stem this crisis. HR 2327 would impose a six-month moratorium on pension plan terminations of the kind underway at United – those initiated by the PBGC in a backroom deal with the company that cuts employees’ voices out of the process. With a six-month moratorium on PBGC-initiated terminations, alternatives to termination might be crafted through collective bargaining. And Congress can work to pass a more permanent solution to the crisis. If any of these plans can be saved, they should and must be saved. We know all too well that the wholesale dumping of all the employee plans at United not only results in real pain for the families of United employees and retirees but also provides a dangerous incentive for other companies in the airline industry and beyond to follow suit. It’s time for Congress to act.

Over the course of this e-hearing, we have been providing all Members of Congress with excerpts from the employee and retiree statements to show how real and immediate this pension crisis is. And Members of Congress have been responding. At the moment, 88 Members of Congress are co-sponsoring HR 2327. Undoubtedly, if they hear from their constituents, more will join.

In the Senate last week, Senators Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, Daniel Akaka of Hawaii, and Frank Lautenburg of New Jersey introduced a Senate companion bill to HR 2327 – appropriately called the Stop Terminating Our Pensions Act, the STOP Act. We will work hard with the Senate to pass these bills, but we cannot do it – and could not have done what has been accomplished thus far – without the help of the kinds of concerned employees, retirees, and citizens who have graciously provided their individual stories. Success is uncertain. It will be an uphill battle. But justice is on our side.

We have been working diligently to read your statements. Our staff have been posting many of them to this website, but, frankly, we have been overwhelmed by the sheer number of responses and have not been able to keep up with them. While this e-hearing is now over, we will continue to pour over statements and post many more to this website. All statements are being read, and all will become a part of the record we will keep of this e-hearing whether posted to the website or not.

Thanks to all the witnesses – over 1,000 of you – who have provided us with testimony. We are extremely grateful and humbled by your thoughtful and heartfelt statements.