BP Employees, Outraged by Lack of Compensation, Warn Oil Spill Victims

"Long-term employees accuse oil giant BP of greed, exploitation and lying about their pensions.

Earlier this month BP's attempts to curb compensation payouts to those impacted by its 2010 Gulf of Mexico disaster failed after its appeal was rejected by a US court.

Dozens of people and businesses that have claims against the oil giant have told Truthout they are infuriated at the company's ongoing attempts to avoid payments, and they are not alone.

Several long-term senior BP employees are incensed at what they believe is BP's attempt to short-change them on their pensions.

Russel Stauffer worked for BP for 32 years, but left in 2012 in "disgust."

"I quit the company as 'Head of Finance for the Gulf of Mexico'," Stauffer told Truthout. "I had a sweet job, but I could no longer stand the injustice and lies at work."

Stauffer, who worked for BP in Houston, used these strong words to describe what he and at least 450 other BP America employees are outraged over - what they describe as their company reneging on their pension plans by up to 75 percent, lying about it, and actively working against them in order not to pay them retirement benefits that were promised.

According to Stauffer, the issue has grown large enough and been ongoing long enough that BP's vice president of the Houston region supported him in leading a group to conduct conversations with BP's Human Resources department to resolve the issue.

"HR instead cooked up prevarications and took them to BP's CEO Bob Dudley so that he would forever close the book on this issue," Stauffer said.

Fritz Guenther, a BP employee and United Steelworkers Union member working in Alaska, who has worked for BP for 35 years, said he and his colleagues are "currently fighting to get back the pension plans that BP promised us in writing in 1989."

"We were openly lied to by BP managers and HR people that when we were converted to the "new" plan that it would be as good or better than the existing and industry competitive plan," Guenther told Truthout. "Now that many of us are reaching retirement age, we are finding out that we have less than 50 percent of what we would have had if BP's promise was true or if we had remained in the old plan." "

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