Mrs. A, a Connecticut resident, contacted the New England Pension Assistance Project (NEPAP) for help with her survivor benefits from the Railroad Retirement Board. Mrs. A’s late husband was a long-time employee of the railroad. Mrs. A and her husband lived apart for the last decade of their marriage, but never got divorced.

In early December, a 68 year-old woman living on a modest income in Vermont called the New England Pension Assistance Project after finding our website. She was frustrated because she thought she was entitled to a pension, but had no idea how to find it. She told us that she had belonged to the District 65 Union, and had worked as a machine operator in three union shops in New York for about 15 years ending in the mid-1980s. She only remembered the name of one of her former employers, and she had no documentation except a union card from 1980. She knew that the union office had been on Astor Place in New York City. She knew that it was no longer there, but apart from that, she could not provide us with any information about her possible pension entitlement.

The case was assigned to Renee Summers, one of our counselors. She began to investigate and found that District 65 had become a unit of the United Auto Workers in 1981. After extensive follow-up, she learned that the District 65 UAW Pension Plan had been terminated and that benefits were being paid through a third-party administrator in New Jersey. She then contacted this third-party administrator and found that the client was in their records, and was entitled to a retirement benefit of $225 per month. This benefit will be paid retroactive to her 65^th birthday. It is very unlikely that she would have found this money without NEPAP’s assistance. The retroactive lump sum and the ongoing monthly lifetime benefit, with a projected lifetime value of over $60,000, will have a significant impact on our client’s life and on her economic security.

David Howell of Hamden, Connecticut, had worked in many different jobs for Stop & Shop from 1964 until 1991. He started work as a parking lot attendant and ended as a manager, so he was surprised to hear from Stop & Shop that, with all those years of work, he was not eligible for a pension. Unable to pursue his claim without experienced help, he called the New England Pension Assistance Project (NEPAP) in early 2011. He had heard about the Project in a 2005 article in the New Haven Register, and had saved the article in case he ever needed help with a pension.

The case was assigned to Pension Counselor Mollie Feeney, who quickly realized that Mr. Howell might have more than one pension, since some of his years with Stop & Shop were in union work, and other years were in management. Among Mr. Howell’s documents, she found a 1985 letter from the Retail Employees Union stating that he may be eligible for a pension when he reached retirement age. Over the years, union pension plans, like corporation plans, can move and merge. Working through the national United Food and Commercial Workers Union, she was able to trace Mr. Howell’s union pension to the Retail Employers Union United Food Pension Plan in Farmington, Connecticut. As a result, Mr. Howell is now receiving a monthly benefit for life.

In the meantime, she had also been investigating the possibility of a separate pension from the management work under the company-sponsored pension plan. The company’s response was that Mr. Howell was not eligible for this pension, since he had only worked in management less than three years, but five years were required for vesting. What the plan had not taken into account, but NEPAP knew, was that a provision in the federal law that governs pensions could change this result. Even though Mr. Howell only had two years of “service credit” under the company-sponsored plan, the plan was required to count all of his Stop & Shop employment for purposes of vesting. We filed a claim with the plan administrator, pointing out this provision of the law and providing proof of the union employment. As a result, the plan agreed that Mr. Howell was vested, and paid him a lump sum pension.

The New England Pension Assistance Project’s advocacy on Mr. Howell’s behalf resulted in his receiving a monthly benefit from his union pension and a lump sum payout for his as a Stop & Shop manager. As Mr. Howell wrote on learning the news, “Thank you for your great service.”

The New England Assistance Project recently helped a young widow unravel her late husband’s complicated pension situation. Suddenly widowed at the age of 52, she (we’ll call her K) contacted her husband’s past employers. Among them was a Municipal Water Pollution Control Authority, where he had worked for close to 10 years. K knew he had mentioned earning a pension from this job, so she reported his death to this municipality just a few weeks after he died. After two months of frequent trips to the municipality’s main office, she had not obtained a survivor benefit or even the promise of benefit forms.

At that point, K contacted her local United Way help line (211), which recommended she call the New England Pension Assistance Project. Although K’s husband had worked at one location for the municipality for over nine years, the path to his survivor benefit was not that simple. Within one year of starting work with the municipality, the department was privatized. To further complicate things, three years after privatizing the department, the municipality opted to go with a different private water treatment company. In addition, each of the two privatized companies was sold or acquired by other companies.

The municipality had no contacts at each company and did not appear to know that US Filter was no longer in existence and that a new company was now responsible for the pensions. In the end employees were credited with service for all time worked, even though different companies were responsible for paying the benefits. For his nine plus years of credited service, three different entities provided a portion of the benefit. The first six months of his survivor benefit were paid by the municipality.

Benefits for the next three plus years were paid by Veolia Water Systems, the successor company for Profession Service Group, which was the successor company for US Filter. Benefits for the next five plus years were paid by KGI Bridgeport, the successor company to Aquarion.

Overall, this case was quite a tangled web. Once the client began receiving benefits from each correct source, the New England Pension Assistance Project provided the municipality with a list of contact names/addresses and phone numbers so the next retiree or survivor should have an easier path to benefits.