Workers who retired after years of working for Sears Holdings Corp. banded together earlier this year to complain when the retailer’s bankrupt shell terminated their life insurance plan. Those benefits were potentially worth thousands of dollars to heirs of the former employees. Now the Sears estate has responded with a proposal that would pay them about $135 each, Bloomberg News reported. It’s another blow to workers who’ve seen livelihoods disappear as the department store chain, once the biggest in the U.S., slid toward bankruptcy. Sears filed for court protection last year and sold its stores and most of its assets to a unit of Eddie Lampert’s ESL Investments Inc. in January. The deal left behind the Sears estate, which is responsible for settling old debts, including the life insurance plan. The retiree plan provided policies to about 29,000 former workers with death benefits between $5,000 and $14,500, according to a new court filing that lays out the estate’s proposal. A smaller group of a dozen retired senior executives had policies with death benefits between about $356,000 and $2.7 million. The proposal to modify the plan would terminate the plan and award eligible Sears retirees an unsecured claim of $5,000. But given the estate’s limited resources, holders of unsecured claims will receive estimated payouts of 2.3 percent to 2.7 percent, according to the filing — or about $115 to $135.
