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Pension Reform

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A railcar brings coal to the White Bluff Steam Electric Station at Redfield. Curtailments in rail shipments of coal have led to shortages at White Bluff and other coal-fired plants in Arkansas and across the country. ACRE is working for legislative solutions to the problem.

A railcar brings coal to the White Bluff Steam Electric Station at Redfield. Curtailments in rail shipments of coal have led to shortages at White Bluff and other coal-fired plants in Arkansas and across the country. ACRE is working for legislative solutions to the problem.

One prime example of how ACRE works for cooperative employees came in August 2006 when Congress passed a comprehensive pension reform law. The electric cooperatives, through the efforts of the National Rural Electrification Association (NRECA) and the Action Committee for Rural Electrification (ACRE), were exempted from the law.

"If we had been lumped in with all the other companies, it would have cost cooperatives a quarter of a billion dollars more each year, or benefits would have had to have been scaled back drastically," said Carmie Henry, AECI's vice president for governmental affairs. "This is a big win for the co-ops and ACRE."

The cooperatives had struggled with this issue for some time and feared the organizations would be "lumped in with all the bad actors that were not paying their pension plans." Those "bad actors" included some of the airlines and most notably, Enron, the former energy giant that experienced a financial meltdown in the wake of managerial corruption. When the company declared bankruptcy, thousands of workers were left without their life savings or pension plans.

In passing the comprehensive pension reform law, the 109th Congress recognized the special nature of the cooperatives' multiple-employer defined benefit pension plan and its lack of risk of default to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. NRECA's Retirement Security Plan (RS Plan) administers benefits for approximately 54,000 employees at 881 co-ops in 47 states.