Pension Rights Center

We champion policies to protect and promote retirement security for American workers and their families.  We also provide expert assistance and information to individuals with retirement plan problems and questions.

Why do we exist?

The Pension Rights Center is the nation's only consumer organization dedicated solely to protecting and promoting the retirement security of American workers, retirees and their families. The Center:

 •Helps people obtain wrongfully denied pensions and other retirement   benefits
 •Promotes policies that address the problem of inadequate retirement   incomes
 •Explains, clearly and comprehensibly, complex pension laws and regulations
 •Acts as a consumer watchdog to preserve key retirement income   safeguards

The Pension Rights Center is known for its credibility and untiring commitment to economic justice.

What have you accomplished?

Every day, the Pension Rights Center assists individuals with retirement income problems.  Additionally, pension provisions in more than a dozen federal laws and regulations are traceable directly to Center initiatives. Millions of retirees, widows, and divorced women are now receiving pensions as a result of our activities.  Here are three of the individuals we have helped, and policies we have changed:

 •When Richard Pennington, a machinist, was told that he wouldn’t get the pension he had counted on, he turned to the Pension Rights Center. We discovered that his plan had failed to credit him with vacation time, and he got his pension.
Richard’s situation, and that of others, persuaded Congress to create the Administration on Aging’s Pension Information and Counseling Program. The Pension Rights Center provides training and legal advice to the Program’s six regional counseling projects, which serve 27 states.

 •Marjorie Doherty’s former husband was a federal employee. After his death, she was left destitute. A lifetime homemaker, she had no pension of her own, and because her husband had been covered by the Civil Service Retirement System, she was not eligible for Social Security survivor benefits.
Working with a group of divorced civil service widows, the Center was able to secure the enactment of legislation that provided special survivor annuities to Marjorie and countless others. Now we are working with the Women’s Pension Coalition to help other divorced widows of federal employees who were inadvertently left out of the protections of the law.

 •Janice Winston, an engineer at what is now Verizon, had worked 23 years and counted on getting a full pension. When the company announced a change in her plan, she discovered that she stood to lose more than $200,000. Working with a grassroots coalition formed by the Center, Janice and her co-workers convinced the company to reverse its decision.

After Janice retired, she volunteered to work with the Center and grassroots activists around the country to campaign successfully for provisions included in the Pension Protection Act of 2006 that prevents other companies from making similar unfair changes in their plans.

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