President Biden boasted last week about his administration’s bailout of union multiemployer pension plans, enacted in the American Rescue Plan supposedly to address pandemic-related problems. “Millions of workers will have the dignified retirement they earned and they deserve,” he said July 6 in Cleveland. In fact, the American taxpayer will bear the cost of union plans that were insolvent long before the pandemic. The bailout all but guarantees future insolvency or another bailout and constitutes a massive giveaway to labor unions.
Multiemployer pension plans are a creation of unions. They are defined-benefit retirement plans, maintained under collective-bargaining agreements, in which more than one employer contributes to the plan. These plans are typically found in industries such as trucking, transportation and mining, in which union members do work for multiple companies.
