Blame Pro-Union Monopoly Policies For Underfunded Pensions

A man in suit and red tie talking to someone.


In an op-ed recently published by CNS News, I discuss pension shortfalls that have already hit the pocketbooks of tens of thousands of unionized retirees across the country, and will surely be faced by millions of additional workers over the next two decades:

Hundreds of the roughly 1,400 multiemployer pension plans across the country are now in deep trouble primarily for one reason:  The contributions going into these funds, in amounts determined through union monopoly bargaining, were never sufficient to pay for the pensions that union bosses and their agents told workers they would provide.

Emblematic of the multiemployer pension crisis is the Teamsters 400,000-participant Central State Pension Fund.  It is funded at a level of 28 percent to 38 percent, depending on the assumption you make about future investment performance, and is headed towards insolvency in 2025.

For 30 years, Tim Chmil (left) was a unionized trucker. In early 2017, he was one of thousands of New York Teamster retirees whose pensions were slashed, in his case by more than 50%. The key reason why is that union officials consistently neglected to get a sufficiently high share of employees’ compensation packages set aside for pensions to make promised benefits a reality. Photo: Susan Watts/New York Daily News

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