Certain underfunded pensions plans are getting a boost, Labor Secretary Marty Walsh announced Friday.
Specifically, roughly 200 troubled multiemployer plans covering some 3 million workers will get help under an interim final rule issued by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. The rule implements Special Financial Assistance to financially ailing multiemployer pension plans:
“Every working person deserves to retire with dignity and receive all the benefits they earned during their career,” Walsh said in a statement. “As a member of the labor movement, I know firsthand how important pension security is to working families. As Chair of its Board of Directors, I am proud that today’s rulemaking by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation will help secure the pensions of an estimated 3 million American workers, retirees, and their families by providing financial assistance to over 200 severely underfunded multiemployer plans.”
Calling it an historic achievement, he claimed it will “secure the pension benefits of hardworking union members” and is the most “substantial policy ever passed to further the solvency of our nation’s multiemployer pension plans.”
“Unions, their members, and beneficiaries of these plans have been fighting for years for what these workers have earned,” Walsh added. “The Biden-Harris administration made it a priority to stand with them, working closely with Congress to ensure this assistance was included in the American Rescue Plan. The PBGC’s regulation implements the program just as Congress designed it. This is just one way the administration is protecting the retirement benefits of workers and retirees, which is one of my top priorities at the Department of Labor.”
There are about 1,400 multiemployer pension plans that cover about 10 million active and retired workers, according to the American Action Forum, a conservative think tank on economic, domestic, and fiscal policy issues.
“Collectively, these plans hold about $496 billion in assets but face $1.2 trillion in liabilities for a net liability of $672 billion,” it notes.