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Text: Nothing in ERISA requires employers to establish employee benefits plans. Nor does ERISA mandate what kind of benefits employers must provide if they choose to have such a plan. Shaw v. Delta Air Lines, Inc., 463 U. S. 85, 91 (1983); Alessi v. Raybestos-Manhattan, Inc., 451 U. S. 504, 511 (1981). ERISA does, however, seek to ensure that employees will not be left empty-handed once employers have guaranteed them certain benefits. As we said in Nachman Corp. v. Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, 446 U. S. 359 (1980), when Congress enacted ERISA it "wanted to . . . mak[e] sure that if a worker has been promised a defined pension benefit upon retirement--and if he has fulfilled whatever conditions are required to obtain a vested benefit--he actually will receive it." Id., at 375. Accordingly, ERISA tries to "make as certain as possible that pension fund assets [will] be adequate" to meet expected benefits payments. Ibid.

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To increase the chances that employers will be able to honor their benefits commitments--that is, to guard against the possibility of bankrupt pension funds--Congress incorporated several key measures into the Act. Section 302 of ERISA sets minimum annual funding levels for all covered plans, see 29 U. S. C. Section(s) 1082(a), 1082(b), and creates tax liens in favor of such plans when those funding levels are not met, see Section(s) 1082(f). Sections 404 and 409 of ERISA impose respectively a duty of care with respect to the management of existing trust funds, along with liability for breach of that duty, upon plan fiduciaries. See Section(s) 1104(a), 1109(a). Finally, Section(s) 406 of ERISA prohibits fiduciaries from involving the plan and its assets in certain kinds of business deals. See Section(s) 1106. It is this last feature of ERISA that is at issue today.

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Congress enacted Section(s) 406 "to bar categorically a transaction that [is] likely to injure the pension plan." Commissioner v. Keystone Consol. Industries, Inc., 508 U. S. 152, 160 (1993). That section mandates, in relevant part, that "[a] fiduciary with respect to a plan shall not cause the plan to engage in a transaction, if he knows or should know that such transaction constitutes a direct or indirect . . . transfer to, or use by or for the benefit of a party in interest, of any assets of the plan." 29 U. S. C. Section(s) 1106(a)(1)(D).1 The question here is whether this provision of ERISA prevents an employer from conditioning the receipt of early retirement benefits upon the participants' waiver of employment claims. For the following reasons, we hold that it does not.