Union officers’ pension plans are significantly better funded than the plans they negotiate for their rank-and-file counterparts, according to a study by the Hudson Institute.

By Aleksandra Kulczuga – The Daily Caller

Union officers’ pension plans are significantly better funded than the plans they negotiate for their rank-and-file counterparts, according to a study by the Hudson Institute.

As The Daily Caller reported yesterday, new legislation could shift the costs of union pension plans to taxpayers as the problem of union members’ declining pension funds becomes more dire. But because union officers are usually employees of the union itself and not of a private business, they have their own pensions with rules that are separate from those of their members’ plans.

The average union staff plan is funded at over 95 percent, while the average funding percentage of a rank-and-file member’s pension plan is 79 percent, according to the Hudson Institute. None of the staff pensions are on the Department of Labor’s list of critically underfunded pension plans, while more than half of rank-and-file pension plans are endangered. (A pension is considered “endangered” by the government when it contains less than 80 percent of the assets needed to cover its liabilities.)

Some have questioned why pension plans negotiated on behalf of union members are performing so poorly while union leaders’ pension funds remain healthy.

“Unions are pay and benefits experts — they know this stuff six ways to Sunday, it’s their raison d’etre,” said Brett McMahon, the Vice President of Miller and Long Construction and a member of the national trade association Associated Builders and Contractors. ”It’s not as if they can claim some kind of ignorance about this, that by chance or happenstance these are funded better than those. They know exactly what they’re doing.”

The higher pension contributions to the staff plans come straight from the dues paid by union members, according to the Hudson Institute. In fact, the main reason union leaders are so eager for new recruits, the study found, was to bankroll the failing collectively bargained pension plans.

FULL STORY

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