© 2024 Pension Rights Center. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 2.5 Generic License.
By David Brandolph
On this Labor Day, the Pension Rights Center rededicates itself to preserving and enhancing the retirement income security of American workers who, through their toil and perseverance, built our country and keep it running. Today, we’re also celebrating the 50th anniversary of the landmark federal private pension law, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), which has been hailed as the most important piece of social legislation since passage of Social Security.
Enacted in 1974, on a bipartisan basis and signed into law by President Ford, ERISA protects private sector workers from losing promised retirement benefits and from mismanagement of plan funds. Before ERISA became law, an employer could terminate an unfunded pension plan without consequence. And just such a reality — the 1963 implosion of the Studebaker-Packard Company’s pension plan that decimated the earned pensions of thousands of auto workers – was one of the major events that precipitated ERISA’s passage.
ERISA sought, first and foremost, to end broken promises to workers and retirees. It established minimum standards for how long people needed to work to earn a pension and created funding and fiduciary rules to ensure plans were appropriately funded and administered solely in the interest of workers and retirees. Perhaps ERISA’s greatest achievement was the creation of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the federal insurance backstop that pays earned benefits in the event of plan insolvency. Because of ERISA, millions of people are receiving pensions they otherwise would have lost.
Two years after ERSA’s enactment, in 1976, Karen Ferguson founded PRC with $10,000 in seed money from famed consumer advocate Ralph Nader. His simple directive: “make pensions an issue.” And for the past 48 years, PRC has embarked on an unwavering mission of creating a more fair and equitable retirement income security system – and we’ve certainly helped make pensions a key economic security issue! It’s not an overstatement to say that the Pension Rights Center has been instrumental in the development of every ERISA-improving consumer-oriented law enacted over the intervening decades, including provisions in the Retirement Equity Act, the Tax Reform Act, the Butch Lewis Emergency Pension Plan Relief Act, and SECURE 2.0. All these laws have helped expand protections and secured benefits for millions of divorced spouses, older workers and retirees.
PRC has also worked over the years to help ensure that courts enforce ERISA provisions and, as the resource center to six pension counseling and information projects, assisted tens of thousands of people get the retirement benefits that they earned.
As we mark ERISA’s 50th anniversary and reflect on PRC’s achievements, we face the reality that much more work is needed from all of us to ensure that every American worker can retire with dignity.
It’s a moral imperative that we begin reversing the dismal fact that an adequate retirement income is unattainable for most Americans. The workers whom we honor this Labor Day deserve no less.
