May 12, 2017 3 min read

U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., joined a group of coal-state senators Thursday to introduce legislation that would fund the pensions of retired union coal miners.

The Miners Pension Protection Act would shore up the United Mine Workers’ 1974 pension plan using excess money in the Abandoned Mine Land Fund, money used to restore abandoned mine lands.

The union’s multiemployer pension fund, adversely affected by the 2008 financial crisis and coal company bankruptcies, is expected to become insolvent within the next five years.

“Our retired miners have earned the pension security promised as they labored to build our great nation,” Casey said in a statement released with the bill’s introduction. “I don’t plan to stop until these promises are kept and we win the fight on pensions.”

The 1974 pension plan provides benefits to about 88,000 retired coal miners in the eastern United States and covers future claims for an additional 30,000 miners. The pension fund is expected to be insolvent by 2022, UMW spokesman Phil Smith said.

The legislation was first introduced last year, and a portion of it was addressed in a spending bill approved by Congress earlier this month.

The spending bill included permanent funding for health-care benefits for more than 22,000 retired union miners who had worked at companies that filed for bankruptcy in recent years. It did not, however, address the union’s failing pension plan.

“Now that we have secured a permanent health-care fix for our retired miners, it’s time to keep the second part of the promise and secure the pensions that they have earned over a lifetime of hard and dangerous work,” Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., said.

“For most of these retired miners, their pension is the difference between paying the bills or being kicked out of their house, putting food on their tables or going hungry,” he said.

UMW President Cecil E. Roberts, in a statement issued Thursday, said the pension plan does not provide “rich” monthly pensions. The average monthly check is $586, he said.

“That may not sound like a lot in Washington, D.C., but it is the difference between buying food or paying the electric bill for these retirees and widows, who live in every state in America,” he said.

Roberts said the failure to act would not only be cruel to those who worked all their lives expecting to have money in retirement but could also jeopardize the program, which guarantees pensions of insolvent private pension programs.

“Indeed,” Roberts said, “it will cause the collapse of the government pension backstop, the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp., leading to a far greater cost to the government than it would cost to fix this problem now.”

Smith said Friday that it’s way too early to say how any legislative action might play out. Lawmakers have been floating various proposals to address failing multi-employer pension plans such as the UMW’s, he said.

The UMW’s situation, however, is slightly different from those involving other insolvent pensions, he said, because it includes a “clear source of funding” to shore up the plan. That source has been used in the past to address issues regarding the union’s retirement benefits, he said