The U.S. Court of Federal Claims has dismissed a 2016 class action lawsuit demanding that the Department of Energy reinstate pension benefits for up to 500 people for work performed at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
Chief Judge Susan G. Braden ruled Sept. 22 that plaintiffs who worked for Lockheed Martin Services Inc. had not established they had an implied contract with DOE. Plaintiffs plan to appeal, said Peter Turping, the lead plaintiff: “We believe we can prove there was a contract.”
Plaintiffs’ potential pension benefits were reduced and they lost their retirement health and life insurance benefits when Fluor in 1996 received a new prime contract for cleanup of the former plutonium production complex. The contract proposal included an economic diversification plan to award some work to new “enterprise companies” to help support them as they solicited contracts beyond Hanford. The goal was to make them permanent parts of the local economy and reduce its dependence on Hanford.
As Westinghouse’s contract expired and cleanup operations transitioned to Fluor in 1996, many Westinghouse workers became Fluor employees, while retaining the same Hanford benefits. But about 2,000 Westinghouse and Westinghouse subcontractor personnel were assigned to enterprise companies. They would no longer accrue years-worked to count toward their traditional Hanford pension calculation, they were told. Workers assigned to the enterprise companies said they were barred from applying for other Hanford work if they did not accept their assignments.
Most of the enterprise companies failed to acquire significant non-Hanford work, with some folding within two years. Many of their workers were absorbed back into the traditional workforce at the site and were again eligible for full Hanford retirement benefits. However, Lockheed Martin Services provided information technology and other services at Hanford for about two decades.
Lockheed Martin Services retirees maintained in their lawsuit that DOE was required by the Hanford Multi-Employer Pension Plan to give them full retirement benefits. They said that even though they were transitioned from Westinghouse to Lockheed Martin Services, many of them performed the same Hanford work at the same desks with the same co-workers. Braden said in her ruling that the offer letter given to workers by Lockheed Martin Services in 1996 “does not evidence DOE’s intent to contract with plaintiffs.”
