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U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell is leading a bipartisan coalition of 89 representatives in asking the U.S. Treasury Department to reject a Central States Pension Fund request to cut retiree benefits.

It’s one of the largest Teamster pension funds that includes 30,000 members in Michigan. If approved, the proposal sparked by the Kline-Miller Multiemployer Pension Reform Act of 2014 would impact 273,000 current and future retirees, Dingell’s office said in a statement Tuesday that said the cuts could be as high as 70 percent.

In Kline-Miller, Congress established a new process for certain multiemployer pension plans to propose a temporary or permanent reduction of pension benefits if a plan is projected to run out of money before paying all promised benefits.

“This is an issue of fundamental fairness,” Dingell said. “These employees worked a lifetime thinking they would have a pension to retire on, and now they don’t know what they will live on. These cuts would have a devastating impact on workers, retirees, families and whole communities and we should make every effort to ensure workers receive the benefits they’ve earned.”

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