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The Forgotten Employee Benefit Crisis: Multiemployer Benefit Plans On The Brink, Paul M. Secunda

Paul M. Secunda

This article provides a first time look at the numerous challenges facing multiemployer or Taft-Hartley benefit plans in the post-global recession and health care reform world. These plans have provided pension, health, and welfare benefits to union members of smaller employers in itinerant industries for over sixty years and even today, these plans collectively have over ten million participants in over 1500 plans.

Multiemployer plans are increasingly mired in financial trouble and are finding it more difficult to continue to provide adequate retirement and health benefits to their members. Although they once represented one of the great triumphs in American …