THE NEW YORK TIMES

By: Mary Williams Walsh

A prominent Teamsters pension fund, one of the largest, has filed for reorganization under a new federal law and has sent letters to more than 400,000 members warning that their benefits must be cut.

Any reorganization of the decades-old Central States Pension Fund would take months and would probably be a brutal battle as workers, retirees, union leaders and employers all seek to protect competing interests. It is a multiemployer plan, the type led jointly by a union and a number of companies, that has caused consternation for many years, because if it failed, it could wipe out a federal insurance program that now pays the benefits of a million retirees.

If the reorganization ultimately proves successful, however, it could serve as a model for other retirement plans with similar, seemingly intractable financial problems.

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