PENSIONS

aside for their retirement.

“It’s not over,” said Mike Walden, a retired truck driver from Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, who is president of the Teamsters’ National United Committee to Protect Pensions.

Central States’ pension program is a multiemployer pension — one that allows employers to pool resources and provide workers with retirement security. For Walden and many other Teamsters, such plans were virtually the only game in town when they got into the trucking business.

The plans, negotiated by unions, were administered by trustees selected by the union and employers. They were a key part of collective bargaining: Many of the workers in the Central States plan, when offered the choice of higher salaries or better retirement benefits, chose the latter.

And for years, the plans worked, running at a surplus. But a culmination of factors in the 2000s — two stock-market crashes, a deregulation of the trucking industry that led to the bankruptcy of many of the companies participating in Central States, and retirements among baby boomers — changed the pension plan’s fate quickly. By the mid-2000s, it was in trouble.

In 2015, Central States offered a plan that would slash retirees’ benefits, sending out letters such as the one that sent Butch Lewis into a miasma of stress. The Treasury Department ultimately rejected that plan, but the pensioners are in limbo nonetheless, wondering whether the money they had banked on for retirement will disappear.

Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, said the longer the federal government waits to act, the more desperate the situation will become. He had pushed a bill named for Butch Lewis that would have provided a low-interest, 30-year loan to troubled pension plans, with no cuts to benefits, and he tried unsuccessfully to attach the bill to larger spending bills last week and last month. Both times, he was met with fierce resistance from conservatives, who called the loan program a bailout.

Brown said that as the Senate worked toward a budget deal last week without including the pension bill, he got involved. “I said, ‘If we can’t do Butch Lewis, here’s what we need: We have to have something serious and substantive to show pensioners that Congress takes this seriously.’”

Brown hopes to become the Democratic chair of the committee that is being created.

The committee will include four Republicans and four Democrats each from the House and from the Senate — 16 members total — and will hold at least five public meetings, including one field hearing outside Washington, D.C., with the goal of making it easier for retirees to tell their stories.

The committee will have until late November to craft a plan that would be put before the House and Senate for up-or-down votes. Neither chamber will be permitted to amend the agreement.

The Teamsters’ Walden said that although he would have preferred that Congress take up the proposed Butch Lewis Act, he’s happy to see movement on the issue.

“It’s somewhat of a ‘kicking the can down the road’ again, but at least we see some resolve,” he said. “I like that they’re doing something that says they have to do something.”

Walden said he’s hopeful that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will choose Republicans from union states — such as Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio — for the panel.

For his part, Portman said he’s hopeful that the committee will “find a workable solution.”

Rita Lewis, meanwhile, wants Congress to act. She was in Washington last month for President Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech as a guest of Brown, invited to shine a light on the pension issue.

In the final months of her husband’s life, she had come out of her bedroom in the middle of the night to see him sitting in his leather chair, stewing over what to do about his pension and those of his fellow Teamsters. The stress consumed him, she said. Their last conversation, on the day he died, was about the pensions. “It was always on his mind,” she said.

She said she has watched as Congress has repeatedly put the pensioners on the back burner, focusing instead on hurricane relief, health care, tax reform and other issues.

“We did everything the government asked us to do,” she said. “and here we are at this stage of our life. And it’s like we’re invisible.”