Court Opinion

ID: 9453953
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 18:30:01.467037+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:33:53.750239
License: Public Domain

BAZELON, Chief Judge
(concurring in the result):
I agree that these cases must be remanded for further findings of fact. We cannot decide on this record whether the eligibility requirements the trustees have set are arbitrary and capricious.
However, I think we are hardly in a better position to decide whether the trustees’ interpretation of that requirement is arbitrary and capricious. The reasonableness of their interpretation as applied to appellants would seem to depend at least in part on why they left their jobs with contributing employers after long service and what other jobs were then available to them. If they were discharged for cause, for example, or if they voluntarily left service with a contributing employer to get some superior temporary wage benefit from a non-contributor, I would find no difficulty with the trustees’ reading. Similarly, the trustees’ interpretation would seem reasonable if appellants could have found other work with contributing employers after they had left their original employ.
But the facts could conceivably be quite different. Appellants may have been forced off contributing payrolls because their employers closed the mines and because no other job with a contributing employer was available. On those facts, we might well find arbitrary and capricious a reading of the eligibility requirements which would deny appellants their pensions.
Since we must remand in any case, and since the majority opinion suggests that the District Court look into the factual issues I have raised, I would defer judgment on the trustees’ interpretation until all the facts are in.