Court Opinion

ID: 9430367
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:29:35.794615+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:24.220563
License: Public Domain

Justice O’Connor,
with whom Justice Powell joins, concurring.
Today the Court upholds the withdrawal liability provisions of the Multiemployer Pension Plan Amendments Act of 1980 (MPPAA) against a facial challenge to their validity based on the Taking Clause of the Fifth Amendment. I join the Court’s opinion and agree with its reasoning and its result, but I write separately to emphasize some of the issues the Court does not decide today. Specifically, the Court does not decide today, and has left open in previous cases, whether the imposition of withdrawal liability under the MPPAA and of plan termination liability under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) may in some circumstances be so arbitrary and irrational as to violate the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. See Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation v. R. A. Gray & Co., 467 U. S. 717, 728, n. 7 (1984); Nachman Corp. v. Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, 446 U. S. 359, 367-368 (1980). The Court also has no occasion to decide whether the MPPAA may violate the Taking Clause as applied in particular cases, or whether the pension plan in this case is a defined benefit plan rather than a defined contribution plan within the meaning of ERISA.
As the Court indicates, the mere fact that “legislation requires one person to use his or her assets for the benefit of another,” ante, at 223, will not establish either a violation of the Taking Clause or the Due Process Clause. With regard to the latter provision, it is settled that in the field of economic legislation “the burden is on one complaining of a due *229process violation to establish that the legislature has acted in an arbitrary and irrational way.” Usery v. Turner Elkhorn Mining Co., 428 U. S. 1, 15 (1976). Nonetheless, the Court has never intimated that Congress possesses unlimited power to “readjus[t] rights and burdens . . . [and] upse[t] otherwise settled expectations.” Turner Elkhorn, supra, at 16. Our recent cases leave open the possibility that the imposition of retroactive liability on employers for the benefit of employees may be arbitrary and irrational in the absence of any connection between the employer’s conduct and some detriment to the employee. See Turner Elkhorn, supra, at 19, 24-26; Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation v. R. A. Gray & Co., supra, at 733 (discussing Railroad Retirement Board v. Alton R. Co., 295 U. S. 330 (1935)).
Insofar as the application of the provisions of the MPPAA and of ERISA to pension benefits that accrue in the future is concerned, there can be httle doubt of Congress’ power to override contractual provisions limiting employer liability for unfunded benefits promised to employees under the plan. But both statutes impose liability under certain circumstances on contributing employers for unfunded benefits that accrued in the past under a pension plan whether or not the employers had agreed to ensure that benefits would be fully funded. In my view, imposition of this type of retroactive liability on employers, to be constitutional, must rest on some basis in the employer’s conduct that would make it rational to treat the employees’ expectations of benefits under the plan as the employer’s responsibility.
In enacting ERISA, Congress distinguished between two types of employee retirement benefit plans: “defined benefit plan[s]” and “defined contribution plan[s],” also known as “individual account plan[s].” See 29 U. S. C. §§ 1002(34), (35). An employer is subject to plan termination liability under ERISA only if the employee benefit plan to which the employer has contributed is covered by ERISA’s plan termination insurance program, which applies to defined benefit *230plans but not to defined contribution plans. 29 U. S. C. § 1321(b)(1). See Nachman Corp. v. Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, supra, at 363, n. 5. Congress exempted defined contribution plans from ERISA’s termination insurance program because a defined contribution plan does not specify benefits to be paid, but instead establishes an individual account for each participant to which employer contributions are made. 29 U. S. C. § 1002(34). “[U]nder such plans, by definition, there can never be an insufficiency of funds in the plan to cover promised benefits.” Nachman Corp., supra, at 364, n. 5.
By contrast, whenever a plan defines the benefits payable thereunder, the possibility exists that at a given time plan assets will fall short of the present value of vested plan benefits. Congress therefore subjected defined benefit plans to ERISA’s plan termination insurance program, and did so by broadly defining a defined benefit plan as “a pension plan other than an individual account plan.” 29 U. S. C. § 1002(35). We have no occasion today to decide whether this definition sweeps in all plans in which the benefits to be received by employees are fixed by the terms of the plan, even if the plan also provides that the employer’s contributions shall be fixed and shall not be adjusted to whatever level would be required to provide those benefits. Indeed, this litigation began in part as a challenge by the Trustees of the Operating Engineers Pension Plan to a determination by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (hereinafter PBGC) that the Pension Plan is a defined benefit plan. See ante, at 219. That challenge was resolved against the Trustees and is not presented here.
ERISA’s broad definition of defined benefit plan may well mean that Congress imposed contingent liability on contributing employers without regard to the extent of a particular employer’s actual responsibility for the existence of a plan’s promise of fixed benefits to employees and without regard to the extent to which any such promise was conditioned — and *231understood by employees to be conditioned — by plan provisions limiting the employer’s obligations to make contributions to the plan. If so, the application of ERISA may in some circumstances raise constitutional doubts under the Taking Clause or the Due Process Clause.
The same doubts arise with respect to the imposition of withdrawal liability under the MPPAA, which is properly seen as a prophylactic extension of the liability initially imposed by ERISA. Withdrawal liability is intended to ensure that “ ‘an employer withdrawing from a multiemployer plan w[ill] . . . complete funding its fair share of the plan’s unfunded liabilities,”’ R. A. Gray & Co., 467 U. S., at 723, n. 3 (quoting Pension Plan Termination Insurance Issues: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Oversight of the House Committee on Ways and Means, 95th Cong., 2d Sess., 23 (1978) (statement of Matthew M. Lind, Executive Director of PBGC), and thus presupposes that employers can be made hable for those unfunded liabilities in the first instance. Although the MPPAA substitutes liability to the plan for liability to PBGC, the withdrawal liability it imposes on employers who contribute to multiemployer plans reflects the same apparent determination to treat all definite benefits as promises for which the employer can be held liable that underlies termination liability under ERISA. PBGC coverage of a multiemployer plan continues to turn on whether it is a defined benefit plan, and the MPPAA defines the withdrawing employer’s liability to the plan in terms of “unfunded vested benefits,” 29 U. S. C. § 1391, thereby making withdrawal liability turn on the presence of fixed benefits. The MPPAA’s termination liability provisions are complex, but their overall effect is also to hold employers liable for underfunding of vested fixed benefits. See 29 U. S. C. § 1341a. Thus, it is evident that the MPPAA expands on Congress’ decision in ERISA to exempt only defined contribution plans, narrowly defined, from PBGC coverage and employer liability. Whether the employer’s liability is to *232PBGC or to the plan, the thrust of both statutes is to enforce the plan’s promise of fixed benefits against the employer with respect to benefits already accrued.
The degree to which an employer can be said to be responsible for the promise of benefits made by a plan varies dramatically across the spectrum of plans. Where a single employer has unilaterally adopted and maintained a pension plan for its employees, the employer’s responsibility for the presence of a promise to pay defined benefits is direct and substantial. The employer can nominate all the plan’s trustees and enjoys wide discretion in designing the plan and determining the level of benefits. Where such a plan holds out to employees a promise of definite benefits, and where employees have rendered the years of service required for benefits to accrue and vest, it seems entirely rational to hold the employer liable for any shortfall in the plan’s assets, even if the plan’s provisions purport to limit the employer’s liability in the event of underfunding upon plan termination.
Where a pension plan is established through collective bargaining between one or more employers and a union, matters may be different. Such plans, commonly known as “Taft-Hartley” plans, were authorized by § 302(c)(5) of the Labor Management Relations Act, 1947 (LMRA), 61 Stat. 157, codified, as amended, at 29 U. S. C. § 186(c)(5). Taft-Hartley plans are the product of joint negotiation between employers and a union representing employees and are administered by trustees nominated in equal numbers by employers and the union. Ibid. Unlike typical defined benefit plans, which call for variable employer contributions and provide for fixed benefits, most Taft-Hartley plans “possess the characteristics of both fixed contributions and fixed benefits.” J. Melone, Collectively Bargained Multi-Employer Pension Plans 20 (1963) (hereinafter Melone). As PBGC has explained:
“Employers participating in multiemployer plans are generally required to contribute at a fixed rate, specified *233in the collective bargaining agreement. . . . Traditionally, the multiemployer plan or the bargaining agreement have limited the employer’s contractual obligation to contribute at the fixed rate, whether or not the contributions were sufficient to provide the benefits established by the joint board or the collectively bargained agreement.” Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, Multiemployer Study Required by P. L. 95-214, p. 22 (1978) (hereinafter Multiemployer Study).
See also Melone 50; Goetz, Developing Federal Labor Law of Welfare and Pension Plans, 55 Cornell L. Rev. 911, 931 (1970).
Under these hybrid Taft-Hartley plans it is* the plans’ trustees, not the employers and the union, who are “usually responsible for determining the types of benefits to be provided . . . and the level of benefits, although in some cases these are set in the collective bargaining agreement. ” Multi-employer Study 22 (footnote omitted). See also GAO/ HRD-85-58, Comptroller General’s Report to the Congress, Effects of the Multiemployer Pension Plan Amendments Act on Plan Participants’ Benefits, 37, App. I, Table 3 (June 14, 1985) (95% of 139 multiemployer plans surveyed provided that trustees set benefits) (hereinafter Report to the Congress). This delegation of responsibility to the trustees may well stem from an understanding on the part of employers and unions that under the fixed-contribution approach the plan rather than the employers would bear the risks of adverse experience and the benefits of favorable experience in the first instance. See Pension Plans Under Collective Bargaining: A Reference Guide for Trade Unions 64 (American Federation of Labor 1953). If the actuary’s earnings assumptions proved too conservative, the plan would have excess assets that could be used to support an increase in benefits by the trustees, and if asset growth was lower than anticipated, benefits could be reduced. It now appears that Taft-Hartley plan employers will be liable for such experi*234ence losses in many cases, even where withdrawal occurs as a result of events over which an employer has no control, and even though experience gains can still ordinarily be used to increase benefits.
It is also noteworthy that, as this Court held in NLRB v. Amax Coal Co., 453 U. S. 322, 331-332 (1981), “the duty of the management-appointed trustee of an employee benefit fund under § 302(c)(5) is directly antithetical to that of an agent of the appointing party.” ERISA conclusively established that “an employee benefit fund trustee is a fiduciary whose duty to the trust beneficiaries must overcome any loyalty to the interest of the party that appointed him.” Id., at 334. In light of these fiduciary duties, it seems remarkable to impute responsibility to employers for the level of benefits promised by the plan and set by the joint board of trustees, notwithstanding the express limits on employer liability contained in the plan and agreed to in collective bargaining.
Yet that would appear to be what Congress may have done to the extent a Taft-Hartley plan such as the pension plan in this case is treated as a pure defined benefit plan in which the employer promised to make contributions to the extent necessary to fund the fixed benefits provided in the plan. As Representative Erlenborn put it in the hearings on the MPPAA:
“[W]e have taken something that neither looked like a duck, or walked like a duck, or quacked like a duck, and we passed a law [ERISA] and said, ‘It is a duck.’ If it is that easy, I suppose we can repeal the law of gravity and solve our energy problem. It is treating the multi-employer plans where you negotiate a contribution as having put a legal obligation on the employer to reach a level of benefits that has caused the problem.” Hearings on The Multiemployer Pension Plan Amendments Act of 1979 before the Task Force on Welfare and Pension Plans of the Subcommittee on Labor-Management *235Relations of the House Committee on Education and Labor, 96th Cong., 391 (1980) (emphasis added).
The foregoing observations suggest to me that whatever promises a collectively bargained plan makes with respect to benefits may not always be rationally traceable to the employer’s conduct and that it may sometimes be quite fictitious to speak of such plans as “promising” benefits at a specified level, since to do so ignores express and bargained-for conditions on those promises. Where the plan’s fixed-contribution aspects were agreed to by employees through their exclusive bargaining representatives, and where employers had no control over the level of benefits promised, employer responsibility for the benefits specified by the plan is very much attenuated, and employee expectations that those benefits will in all events be paid, in the face of plan language to the contrary, are not easily traceable to the employer’s conduct.
The possible arbitrariness of imposing termination and withdrawal liability on some employers contributing to fixed-cost Taft-Hartley plans may be heightened in particular cases. For example, an employer who agrees to participate in a multiemployer plan long after the plan’s benefit structure has been determined may have had no say whatever in establishing critical features of the plan that determine the level of benefits and the value of those benefits. Similarly, if a plan had regularly undergone increases and reductions in accrued benefits prior to ERISA, any contention that employers caused employees to rely on a promise of fixed benefits might carry even less weight.
Beyond that, the withdrawal provisions of the MPPAA are structured in a manner that may lead to extremely harsh results. For example, it appears that even if the trustees raised benefits for both retired and current employees during the period immediately prior to an employer’s withdrawal, the withdrawing employer can be held liable for the resulting underfunding. Such benefit increases are not uncommon. *236See Report to the Congress 43, App. I, Table 17 (68% of multiemployer plans surveyed increased benefits for working participants during 33 months prior to enactment of the MPPAA); Table 18 (46% of these plans increased retirees’ benefits during the same period). In addition, the presumptive method for calculating employer withdrawal liability is based on the employer’s proportionate share of the contributions made to the plan during the years in which the employer participated. 29 U. S. C. § 1391(b). As a result, because fixed-contribution plans typically do not set each employer’s contributions on the basis of the value of the benefits accrued by that employer’s employees, it seems entirely possible that an employer may be hable to the plan for substantial sums even though that employer’s contributions plus its allocable share of plan earnings exceed the present value of all benefits accrued by its employees.
To be sure, the Court does not address these questions today. Since this case involves only a facial challenge under the Taking Clause to the MPPAA’s withdrawal liability provisions, the Court properly refuses to look into the possibility that harsh results such as those I have noted may affect its analysis, let alone a due process inquiry, when the MPPAA is applied in particular cases. I write only to emphasize some of the issues the Court does not decide today, and to express the view that termination liability under ERISA, and withdrawal liability under the MPPAA, impose substantial retroactive burdens on employers in a manner that may drastically disrupt longstanding expectations, and do so on the basis of a questionable rationale that remains open to review in appropriate cases.