Last year Randy DeFrehn, executive director of the National Coordinating Committee for Multiemployer Plans, hoped that the organization’s newly formed Retirement Security Review Commission, given the task of making recommendations to aid ailing multiemployer (also known as Taft-Hartley) plans, would drive new legislation. The commission’s report, “Solutions Not Bailouts,” created by a coalition of more than 40 multiemployer stakeholders, recommended giving plan trustees the power to partly suspend retiree benefits to shore up failing plans for some of the “multi” universe’s 10.4 million members. Although DeFrehn, 62, has been able to garner support from some union officials, others, including theInternational Brotherhood of Teamsters, as well as organizations like AARP are vehemently opposed to overriding ERISA’s longtime “anticutback” rule. DeFrehn believes it’s better to give all retirees in a plan some benefits rather than draining a dying pension fund until no assets remain. He has the support ofJohn Kline, the Minnesota Republican who chairs the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. “We’re optimistic it will get done in the lame-duck session,” says DeFrehn. A former benefits consultant at Taft-Hartley specialty shop Segal Co., he started in the labor movement at age 23, running a coal miners’ office, and joined the NCCMP in 2001.
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Randy DeFrehn
Executive Director
National Coordinating Committee for Multiemployer Plans
The 2014 Pension 40