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Retirement Security Law Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Retirement Security Law

After Tackett: Incomplete Contracts For Post-Employment Healthcare, Maria O'Brien Hylton Apr 2016

After Tackett: Incomplete Contracts For Post-Employment Healthcare, Maria O'Brien Hylton

Pace Law Review

This is a story about a union and a private sector employer who repeatedly negotiated collective bargaining agreements which referenced side contracts which provided retirees with post-employment healthcare benefits. In the early decades of their relationship neither the union nor the employer appear to have given any thought to whether or not these retiree health benefits in fact vested—i.e. were promised to retirees at no cost for the remainder of their lives. By the 1980s and certainly the 1990s however, as health care costs soared and life expectancy expanded, both parties continued to regularly re-negotiate agreements that were silent as …


A Failure To Supervise: How The Bureaucracy And The Courts Abandoned Their Intended Roles Under Erisa, Lauren R. Roth Jul 2014

A Failure To Supervise: How The Bureaucracy And The Courts Abandoned Their Intended Roles Under Erisa, Lauren R. Roth

Pace Law Review

This Article addresses how courts failed to adequately supervise employers administering pension plans before ERISA. Relying on a number of different legal theories—from an initial theory that pensions were gratuities offered by employers to the recognition that pension promises could create contractual rights—the courts repeatedly found ways to allow employers to promise much and provide little to workers expecting retirement security. In Section III, this Article addresses how Congress failed to create an effective structure for strong bureaucratic enforcement and the bureaucratic agencies with enforcement responsibilities failed to fulfill those functions. Finally, in Section IV, this Article discusses how the …