The idea of ranking pension liabilities ahead of other creditors is fraught with unintended consequences:

First, bondholders and banks will now need full transparency into not just the funding status of the plan, but also its investment policy, asset allocation, manager selection and other contractual arrangements. Bondholders then need to opine on the potential solvency of the plan over time and the cost of its ranking in wind up.

Second, there is a moral hazard risk that as the firm approaches insolvency it increases its payouts to members and increases the size of the liability that ranks ahead of bondholders.  Doing so would lessen the redundancy burden and may even benefit the management team that implements it directly.

So, placing bondholders behind pensioners in the waterfall will have the ultimate effect of reducing the firm's ability to borrow and increasing its cost of capital.

In short, a poor idea.