444
Opinion of the Court
While the NBCWA was amended occasionally and new NBCWAs were adopted in 1968 and 1971, the terms and structure of the 1950 agreement remained largely unchanged between 1950 and 1974. Ibid. In 1974, in order to comply with the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, 29 U. S. C. § 1001 et seq. (1994 ed. and Supp. V), the UMWA and the BCOA negotiated a new agreement to finance benefits. 524 U. S., at 509. The 1974 NBCWA created four trusts that replaced the 1950 fund.3
These benefit plans quickly developed financial problems. Thus, in 1978 the parties executed another NBCWA. This agreement assigned responsibility for the health care of active and retired employees to the respective coal mine operators who were signatories to the earlier NBCWAs, and left the 1974 Benefit Plan in effect only for those retirees whose former employers were no longer in business. Id., at 510.
Nonetheless, financial problems continued to plague the plans "as costs increased and employers who had signed the 1978 NBCWA withdrew from the agreement, either to continue in business with nonunion employees or to exit the coal business altogether." Id., at 511. "As more and more coal operators abandoned the Benefit Plans, the remaining signa-tories were forced to absorb the increasing cost of covering retirees left behind by exiting employers." Ibid. Pursuant to yet another NBCWA, the UMWA and the BCOA in 1988 attempted to remedy the problem, this time by imposing withdrawal liability on NBCWA signatories that seceded from the benefit plans.
Despite these efforts, the plans remained in serious financial crisis and, by June 1991, the 120,000 individuals who
3 These trusts included the UMWA 1950 Benefit Plan and Trust (1950 Benefit Plan), which provided nonpension benefits including medical benefits for miners who retired before January 1, 1976, and the UMWA 1974 Benefit Plan and Trust (1974 Benefit Plan), which provided such benefits for active miners and those who retired after 1975. Id., at 509.
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