Pat Nichols, president of the Teamsters Local 50, spoke at the Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su’s rally at EFI in Centralia on Wednesday to talk to the workers present about the effort to protect their pensions from being cut. Nichols said pensions are one of the most important things to any member of a union.
“The key in being an organized labor individual is fair wages, benefits, security, working conditions, and a pension,” Nichols said. “A pension, folks, for whenever you are at that time to retire. The security of a fair, earned pension is why we all do this.”
Nichols said that over the past several years, workers in the area under the Teamsters union have been in a state of uncertainty about whether their pensions would be cut due to a shortage of funding. Nichols described a series of long, difficult negotiations and negative impacts to businesses that resulted from pension uncertainty.
“We all sit here and we talk about these mandatory pension decreases. But what did that mean to all of us, including our side sitting there with you? It means that we have to take funding and put it into something that we’re not going to get all of it when it’s our time to get it, and that was hard. It was hard for the company, talk about retaining employees. Yes, we have a pension plan: I can tell you maybe it’s going to be there when you go to retire… That is a negative impact when you’re trying to grow your workforce, trying to put people on the floor.”
Nichols went on to talk about the effects of the American Rescue Plan, passed in 2021, on securing pensions and allowing union members across the country to retire with their full pensions.
“I can’t imagine the overwhelming emotional battle that people were going through, knowing that, ‘I’m a few years out from wanting to retire,’ and now you have that ability… Once it was funded, it was mass exodus. A lot of our brothers and sisters that had their time in celebrated that and they are now retired, which is beautiful because it opens up opportunities for newer people to move into the ranks.”
With the Department of Labor’s announcement on Wednesday that the Midwest Teamsters Pension Fund would receive 23.6 million dollars in special financial assistance, Nichols joined the workers of EFI in celebrating their newly secured pensions. He thanked the board members of the Midwest Teamsters fund and Secretary Su for their efforts in securing the funding.
Audience listens to Nichols’ speech. Photo by Pat Hodges.
