Portable Pension Plans for Casual Labor Markets: Lessons from the Operating Engineers Central Pension Fund

by Teresa Ghilarducci, Garth Mangum, Jeff Peterson

Designing pension plans to cover workers and provide the necessary retirement funds for them is one of the critical issues of the turn of the century. Written by four experts in the field of pension funds, this work examines the possibilities for pension reform based on a detailed understanding of a successful system, the union pension fund of the Operating Engineers. This type of plan is managed by workers and management trustees, covering workers that do not have secure and predictable jobs. The authors demonstrate just how this pension fund can provide a useful blueprint for executives, pension fund managers, industrial relations professionals, and public policy decision makers.

216 pages, Hardcover

First published November 30, 1995

About the author

Teresa Ghilarducci is an economist, author, and labor economist, and retirement security expert. Her widely circulated New York Times op-ed "Our Ridiculous Approach to Retirement" brought attention to her fresh and comprehensive critique of the America way of provisioning for retirement. Her book, When I'm 64: The Plot Against Pensions and the Plan to Save Them, presents her cutting-edge policy recommendations for restructuring the United States’ deteriorating retirement income security system. Her book Labor’s Capital: The Economics and Politics of Employer Pensions won an Association of American Publishers award in 1992. For the past five years, she has served as a court appointed trustee of the $50 billion retiree health care fund for ford, GM, and Chrysler retirees. Before coming The New School she was a professor at the University of Notre Dame. Dr. Ghilarducci was the 2006–08 Wurf Fellow at Harvard Law School; her research has been funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, U.S. Department of Labor, Ford Foundation, and Retirement Research Foundation.