Labor and Employment Law Commons^™

Surviving The Storm 2016: Employee Benefit Compliance & Employment Law Update, George Thompson, Brooks R. Magratten, Mark A. Pogue, Kelli Viera, Cecily Banks, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Pension De-Risking, Paul M. Secunda, Brendan S. Maher

Faculty Scholarship

The United States is facing a retirement crisis, in significant part because defined benefit pension plans have been replaced by defined contribution retirement plans that, whatever their theoretical merit, have left significant numbers of workers unprepared for retirement. A troubling example of the continuing movement away from defined benefit plans is a new phenomenon euphemistically called “pension de-risking.”

Recent years have been marked by high-profile companies engaging in various actions designed to reduce the company’s exposure to pension funding risk (hence the term “pension de-risking”). Some de-risking strategies convert a federally-guaranteed pension into a more risky private annuity. Other approaches …

Regulating Employment-Based Anything, Brendan S. Maher

Faculty Scholarship

Benefit regulation has been called “the most consequential subject to which no one pays enough attention.” It exhausts judges, intimidates legislators, and scares off theorists. That need not be so. Reality is less complicated than advertised.

Governments often consider intervention if markets fail to make some socially desirable Good X — such as education, health care, home mortgages, or pensions, for example — sufficiently available. One obvious fix is for the government to provide the good itself. A less obvious intervention is for the government to regulate employment-based (EB) arrangements that provide Good X as a benefit to employees and …

The Effect Of Pegram V. Herdrich On Hmo Liability, Dawn Marie Kelly

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Protective Plan Provisions For Employer-Sponsored Employee Benefit Plans, Kathryn J. Kennedy

Marquette Benefits and Social Welfare Law Review

Federal case law has provided plan sponsors of the

Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA)

covered plans with the ability to insert plan provisions that are

more favorable to the plan sponsor rather than the plan

participant or beneficiary (so-called “protective plan provisions”).

This Article first examines what is the “plan document” for

purposes of ERISA and what protective plan provisions should

be considered for insertion into the plan document and its

related “instruments.”

The Behavioral Economic Case For Paternalistic Workplace Retirement Plans, Paul M. Secunda

Indiana Law Journal

Dependence on 401(k) retirement accounts continues to cause a massive retirement crisis in the United States by leaving most workers unprepared for retirement. The voluntary, inaccessible, employer-centered, expensive, and consumer-driven natures of these plans have combined to make retirement a type of corporate-inspired elder abuse in America.

Behavioral economics considers the utility of permitting individual choice in decision-making settings. Many, however, have been misled to believe that greater choice is always better. Yet, according to one prominent commentator, this consumer-driven paradigm will lead to 48% of current workers between the ages of fifty and sixty-four being poor when they reach …

Allowing States To Help Workers Safe For Retirement: Department Of Labor's Proposed Rulemaking That Provides A Safe Harbor For State Savings Programs Under Erisa, William A. Nelson

Marquette Benefits and Social Welfare Law Review

There is a “retirement crisis” in America. Contributing to

this crisis is the fact that millions of Americans do not have

access to a retirement savings plan through their employers.

States, concerned with the economic stability of their citizens,

have created laws that require private sector employers to

implement state-administered payroll deduction IRA programs

in their workplaces. Even though many states are currently

debating whether to adopt state payroll deduction programs,

this Article will focus on Oregon, Illinois, and California, which

have enacted laws along those lines.

One obstruction to wider adoption of such state measures

has been uncertainty about …

Labor And Employment Law At The 2014-2015 Supreme Court: The Court Devotes Ten Percent Of Its Docket To Statutory Interpretation In Employment Cases, But Rejects The Argument That What Employment Law Really Needs Is More Administrative Law, Scott A. Moss

Publications

No abstract provided.