Teamsters Pension Fund Must Defend Amendments, Calculations

Litigation over how a Teamsters pension fund calculates benefits and restricts post-retirement work is moving forward after a federal judge rejected multiple arguments seeking to have the case dismissed.

The June 21 opinion by Judge Lauren King focused on whether the Western Conference of Teamsters Pension Trust could violate federal benefits law by calculating payments using actuarial factors that retirees say are unreasonable. The Employee Retirement Income Security Act doesn’t explicitly require that these factors be reasonable, King said, but the statutory focus on “actuarial equivalence” requires the use of assumptions that are reasonable, King said.

The opinion, issued in ...