Rep. Kaptur Responds to Rejection of Central States Pension Fund Application
U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) issued the following statement in response to today’s Department of Treasury’s rejection of the Central States Pension Fund application:
“The decision today, rightfully and justly, will require a reevaluation and reset of how to protect the hard-earned pension benefits of 270,000 Teamster retirees, of which 48,000 are Ohioans.
Let me deeply thank the Obama Administration, and especially Special Master Ken Feinberg, for this consequential decision to review a full range of ways and means to assure that Central States retirees and another 1.5 million pensioners in multi-employer plans whose earned benefits also are at risk are protected.
Pension rights and benefits belong to the workers that earned them, not to the investor class like Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Northern Trust that frittered away workers’ benefits to the winds of chance.
Treasury’s rejection is an opportunity for Congress to correct the law that set all this in motion, the Multiemployer Pension Reform Act. Congress cannot duck its responsibility to hold hearings on how this happened, who is responsible, and to consider balanced proposals, such as my legislation, to fix this mess.
Imagine if Congress were to cut monthly Social Security checks for the nearly 40 million retirees currently collecting benefits by up to two-thirds. There would be riots in the streets.”
Kaptur has been a leading critic of a provision known as the Multiemployer Pension Reform Act, or MPRA, snuck in a must-pass spending bill meant to prevent a government shutdown in December 2014. MPRA, passed without prior debate or legislative hearings, sought to avoid potential large-scale systemic pension fund insolvency, but it placed the financial pain on the backs of innocent retirees, who will now bear the entire burden.
Kaptur has authored pending legislation, the Keep Our Pension Promises Act, or KOPPA (HR 2844), to protect earned pensions of workers by filling the financial gap in the fund and reinstate the “anti-cutback'' provisions in ERISA, the bedrock of that law.
Kaptur represents Ohio’s 9th congressional district, including Toledo, the western suburbs of Cleveland, Lorain, and the communities along Lake Erie. Nearly 48,000 Ohioans’ pensions were under threat of these cuts.
###
