Opinion ID: 328214
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Invalidity of the Signatory Last-Year Employment Requirement as Applied to Plaintiffs-Appellees

Text: 26 Rejection of a pension application by the Trustees must stand unless the reviewing court finds that the Trustees' action was arbitrary or capricious. 29 All the frustrated applicants in the plaintiff class were denied pension benefits solely on the basis of the signatory last-year employment requirement of Trustees' Resolution No. 63, 30 which was the resolution in effect at the time the class members filed their applications. Implementation of a bare signatory last employment requirement, in the absence of a requirement of some substantial amount of total signatory service, has been declared arbitrary and capricious by this court in Roark II and its progeny. 27 The Trustees argue, however, that the deficiencies of Resolution No. 63 were rectified by Resolution No. 83, which by Resolution No. 89 was given retroactive effect with respect to applications received before 14 August 1970. Roark II, the Trustees contend, invited them to promulgate new eligibility criteria which, in their discretion, could be applied retroactively. Roark II also recognized that a signatory last employment requirement could advance a legitimate purpose, provided that the Trustee supplied a validating context by requiring some substantial amount of total signatory service, at least five years. The Trustees argue that they were implementing the language of Roark II when they (1) promulgated Resolution No. 83 with its signatory last employment requirement in the validating context of a five-year total signatory service provision, and (2) gave the new resolution retrospective application by means of Resolution No. 89. Therefore, the Trustees conclude, they can now justify their denial of pension benefits to plaintiffs-appellees on the basis of the valid signatory last employment requirement of Resolution No. 83. 31 We disagree. 28 Roark II gave the Trustees discretion to 'make their amended regulation retrospective, in the sense of being applicable to applications hereafter filed even though they relate to past retirements . . . [and] to applications heretofore rejected and subsequently presented for reconsideration.' 32 All members of the plaintiff class filed for pensions before the decision in Roark II, were refused benefits, and filed a complaint in the District Court alleging that the Trustees' rejection of their applications was unlawful. Thus, they are in the same position as the plaintiffs in Roark, Collins, DePaoli, Belcher, and Teston, and the following statement from DePaoli applies with equal force to them: 29 In the language of our opinion in Roark, 'We conclude that relief to the party before us should not be limited to reconsideration of his application under revised eligibility requirements.' Those revised requirements will avail [the plaintiff] nothing. He had filed his application prior to our decision in Roark, he has been denied a pension on the very eligibility requirement struck down in Roark, and, like Roark and Collins, he deserves the same relief. 33 30 The DePaoli analysis was not altered by the subsequent promulgation of Resolution No. 89, giving Resolution No. 83 retroactive effect, for we reached the same result based on the same analysis in Teston v. Carey, 34 which was decided two months after Resolution No. 89 was issued. 31 Finally, we have held, most notably in Danti v. Lewis, 36 that a retired miner who meets all the eligibility requirements in effect at the time he files his application acquires a vested right to pension benefits that survives any subsequent attempt by the Trustees to alter eligibility criteria. The clear import of Danti is that we must focus our attention on the date a pension application was filed to determine what the relevant eligibility requirements were and are. In the instant case, the members of the plaintiff class filed their applications when Resolution No. 63 governed. At that time, the plaintiffs-appellees met all eligibility requirements then in effect except the signatory last employment requirement, which was declared invalid in Roark II. Thus, under Danti, their pension rights vested at the time they applied and could not be undercut by the subsequent establishment of new eligibility criteria. 37 32 In Roark II we did not say so directly, but it would seem obvious, that what would be a 'validating context' for a signatory last employment requirement for future pension applicants might not be equitable, fair, and therefore valid, for current or past pension applicants, who would be powerless to rearrange their past lives. The five years of signatory employment the court implied to be of 'sufficiently significant duration' to provide a 'validating context' for a signatory last employment requirement should have been interpreted by the Trustees with this distinction in mind. An attitude on the Trustees' part that the pension Fund existed for the benefit of the miners who had labored for years and now could labor no more, rejecting any idea that the Fund existed for the Fund itself or for any benefit to the Trustees by the Power inherent in the administration of such a sizable fund, would have gone a long way in preserving the Trustees from the errors of judgment they subsequently made.