Detroit’s bankruptcy filing “must not be used as a tool to impoverish city of Detroit workers or retirees,” says the AFL-CIO Executive Council, in a statement from its July meeting.

City workers already have made severe concessions to keep the city afloat. They are not to blame for Detroit’s financial problems, yet they have been making sacrifices all along the way to help the city out….The AFL-CIO will continue to support our city of Detroit active and retired members in their fight to maintain dignity on the job, a safe workplace, fair wages and benefits for their labor, and against cuts in the pensions they have paid for and earned.

Kevyn Orr, the city’s so-called emergency manager appointed by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R), has called for “significant cuts” to pensions for some 21,000 retired public employees and cuts in benefits and likely wages for current city workers.

The council says, “Corporations have time and time again used the harsh laws of bankruptcy to abrogate the rights of workers and take away pensions working people earned through decades of labor.”

Orr, says the council, has experience doing just as a former member of the law firm Jones Day, which is currently representing Peabody Coal in its Patriot Coal bankruptcy proceeding and is pushing to severely “cut the retirement security of the retired coal miners after a lifetime of backbreaking work in their mines.”

Until the July 18 filing, Snyder, Orr and state lawyers publicly said bankruptcy was not imminent but, says the council:

Gov. Snyder was aware the opposite was true. The governor authorized the city’s bankruptcy filing on July 18, when he realized the court was likely to issue an order protecting retirees’ pension rights under the Michigan Constitution. 

Orr claims that Detroit’s pension liabilities account for $3.5 billion of the city’s debt but, says the council, that is more than three and a half times as much as reported by the Retirement System of the City of Detroit’s actuary and it "raises serious questions about how objective—let alone neutral—he will be in submitting a restructuring plan to a bankruptcy court."

The council is urging President Obama and Congress to commit to an immediate infusion of federal assistance for Detroit and to demand that the federal financial commitment be matched by the state of Michigan. Also:

We call upon Gov. Snyder to make whole the city of Detroit, which saw its share of state revenues slashed by $66 million from 2011 to 2012 by his hand. In total, state aid to Detroit has been cut by $160 million since 2002.

Committing to stand beside Detroit’s working families, public employees and retirees, the council says:

The 12 million members of the AFL-CIO will fight for the workers in Detroit, and for the financial health of this great American city. We will not let Detroit’s proud residents, our sisters and brothers, become the pawns of corporate profiteers.

Read the full statement.