Retired Teamster asks Congress to save troubled pension funds

A Milwaukee man who has been among leaders of a movement to secure government help for troubled pension plans urged members of Congress Wednesday to “think, pray and do what’s right” for retirees threatened with loss of much of their pensions.

Kenneth Stribling, a retired Teamster covered by the Central States Pension Fund, a plan teetering on the brink of insolvency, testified in Washington, D.C., before a joint committee tasked with recommending steps to alleviate the mounting crisis in multi-employer pension plans.

Many of those plans, which cover union workers in fields such as trucking and construction and receive contributions from multiple employers, are on the verge of crashing financially.

And the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. projects its backstop program for multi-employer plans will itself be out of money by 2026.

In 2017, some 1 million Americans were covered by multi-employer plans that the PBGC said were on the road to insolvency and were deemed “critical and declining.”

Chief among those troubled plans is Central States, which covers nearly 400,000 people, including about 23,000 in Wisconsin.

Expected to be insolvent by 2025, Central States has suffered as the deregulation of trucking eroded union clout over the past few decades and the numbers of workers and companies contributing to the fund shrank drastically.

In 1980, with deregulation just beginning, Central States had four working Teamsters for every retiree. Today, the plan pays benefits to five retirees for every worker.

In 2015, Central States proposed to preserve the plan by slashing promised pensions. Many retirees, including Stribling, would have seen their pensions cut by more than 50 percent.

The Treasury Department rejected that proposal in May 2016. But the woes faced by Central States and other multi-employer plans have continued.

To address those problems, Stribling and others have called for passage of legislation introduced late last year and named for Butch Lewis, a former Ohio Teamster leader active in the pension fight. Under the legislation, a new Treasury Department agency would borrow money to finance loans to help distressed pension plans.

Wednesday, Stribling called the Butch Lewis Act “the right solution.”

He told members of the Joint Select Committee on Solvency of Multiemployer Pension Plans of how he was “devastated” when Central States proposed cutting his monthly benefits by 55 percent.

“You have no idea what it’s like to be retired on a fixed income and suddenly be told your monthly check will be cut in half,” Stribling said.

Then, he said, his wife, Beverly, a retired teacher, learned last November that she was terminally ill with pancreatic cancer. She continues to fight the disease.

Like everyone, Stribling said, the Teamster retirees “endure life’s storms – death, illness, physical and mental health challenges. Now we also have the burden of traveling through our golden years with an uncertain financial future, a future that had been promised to us.”

He said the issue is “about fairness – keeping promises to working Americans who did everything right and are simply asking you to preserve what is due us now.”

The joint select committee is to make its recommendations by Nov. 30.