The Non-Financial Ledger: What the Numbers Cannot Contain

There is a category of damage that never appears in a court filing. It does not have a line item in a settlement agreement. It does not show up in the fund’s quarterly report. It lives inside the people who spent thirty years driving milk trucks, loading refrigerator cars, and working overnight shifts in cold-storage facilities because they were told that if they did their part, the pension would do its part back.

The Central States, Southeast and Southwest Areas Pension Fund is not an abstraction. It is the retirement system for tens of thousands of Teamsters-represented workers across the freight, trucking, and dairy industries. The people who paid into it are not investors making calculated bets on financial instruments. They are workers who traded wages for a promise. Every dollar diverted away from that fund is a dollar subtracted from somebody’s rent, somebody’s medication, somebody’s ability to stay in the house they lived in for forty years.

When Borden Dairy Company of Ohio and Borden Transport Company of Ohio withdrew from the fund in November 2014, they did not announce it as a betrayal. In the language of corporate restructuring, it was a withdrawal. In the language of the workers affected, it was a company deciding that its obligations to its own people were negotiable.

The fund sent its bill: $41.6 million. That number is not dramatic to Borden’s corporate ownership group, which spans a Mexican dairy corporation, a Texas LLC, a Nebraska real estate entity, Delaware-registered business shells, and a Colorado dairy operation. To a retired truck driver trying to cover a heating bill in January, it is the difference between dignity and desperation.

Borden contested the number and entered arbitration. The arbitration never produced a ruling because the two parties settled privately in 2016, agreeing on a lower monthly payment of $183,225. Borden made those payments for a few years. Then, in January 2020, Borden filed for bankruptcy protection and the payments stopped. The fund had to go into court to recover what it could. What it got back was $128,576.22. From a $40 million obligation, the workers’ fund walked away with less than one-third of one percent of what was owed.

Meanwhile, the corporate entities that sat inside the same ownership structure as Borden, that shared common control with the companies that made the promise, argued in federal court that they had no obligation to pay. Their lawyers appeared before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals and argued, with straight faces, that a technicality in the procedural path through arbitration meant the pension fund had no legal standing to sue them at all.

That argument nearly worked. A federal district judge agreed with them in November 2023. The workers affected by this decision did not get to appear in that courtroom. Their names are not in the case caption. They are the unnamed constituency for whom every paragraph of this case was ultimately written, and they were not there when it was decided.

It took until March 2025, a full decade after the original withdrawal, for the Third Circuit to reverse that dismissal and give the fund the right to at least try to collect. The case was not over. It was just allowed to continue. The retirees whose monthly checks depend on the fund’s solvency have been waiting for resolution since 2014. They are still waiting.

Legal Receipts: What the Court Record Actually Says

The following are direct quotes from the precedential opinion of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 23-3206, decided March 27, 2025. These are not summaries. They are the actual words in the record.

“The Borden Ohio entities have since gone bankrupt and ceased making withdrawal liability payments. The Fund now seeks to collect those payments from other companies (the ‘Related Employers’) that were commonly controlled with the Borden Ohio entities.”

• This confirms that Borden’s withdrawal created a debt, that Borden then escaped that debt through bankruptcy, and that the fund’s only remaining legal path was to chase the wider corporate ownership group for what the bankrupt entities could not pay.
• It also confirms that the “Related Employers” are not random companies. They were specifically under common corporate control with Borden at the time of the withdrawal, a relationship that triggers joint and several liability under federal law.

“After the Borden Ohio entities withdrew, the Fund, pursuant to 29 U.S.C. §§ 1382(2) and 1399(b)(1), sent them a notice and demand for payment of withdrawal liability in January 2015 for approximately $41.6 million, or 240 monthly payments of $199,647.14.”

• This establishes the original legal obligation: $41.6 million, calculated to represent Borden’s proportional share of the pension fund’s unfunded vested benefits. This was the workers’ money, and it was Borden’s legal obligation from the moment they withdrew.

“The Fund received $128,576.22 toward the withdrawal liability from the bankruptcy distributions.”

• Against a $40 million obligation, the fund received $128,576.22. That is roughly 0.32% of what was owed, under the settlement amount. The gap between what workers were owed and what was actually recovered from Borden’s bankruptcy represents one of the starkest illustrations of how corporate bankruptcy law functions to shield shareholders from labor obligations.

“Laguna and New Laguna ultimately released and waived their claims in a settlement relating to that account in exchange for their release from the obligation to indemnify the debtors for their withdrawal liability to the Fund. Although the Fund participated in other aspects of the bankruptcy cases, it was not a party to that agreement.”

• This is the central act of corporate maneuvering in this case. Two of the related entities, Laguna Dairy (a Mexican corporation) and New Laguna LLC, negotiated themselves out of the indemnification obligation to Borden during the bankruptcy proceedings. They did this in a separate agreement to which the pension fund was not a party and over which it had no control.
• The court notes explicitly that the fund “explicitly reserved its rights to seek payment for the withdrawal liability from non-bankrupt entities,” meaning the fund was aware this was happening and could not stop it.

“They slept on their rights and cannot overcome that failure by asking us now to decide what should have been decided by an arbitrator in the first instance.”

• The court is addressing the related corporate entities directly here. These companies knew, or legally should have known, that the settlement agreement between the fund and Borden represented a revised withdrawal liability assessment. Federal law gave them the right to challenge it through arbitration. They did nothing.
• The court is explicitly rejecting the argument that procedural inaction should serve as a shield against a debt these companies legally shared responsibility for under common-control rules.

“The District Court ruled that ‘the MPPAA does not provide a statutory cause of action to enforce a private settlement agreement.’ More specifically, ‘the action under § 1401(b) is available only in cases where the arbitration proceeding has not been initiated within the statutory period or has been completed.'”

• This is the ruling the Third Circuit overturned. The district court found a procedural technicality that would have let the related corporate entities walk away from the debt entirely, because the settlement was struck in a procedural gray zone: after arbitration started but before any arbitral award was issued.
• Had this ruling stood, it would have created a roadmap for any corporation trying to avoid pension liability: start arbitration, settle to get a discount, go bankrupt, and let the related entities escape clean because no arbitration was ever “completed.”

Societal Impact Mapping

Public Health

The solvency of multiemployer pension funds is directly connected to the physical and mental health of working-class retirees. When those funds are depleted by corporate withdrawals and incomplete repayment, the consequences are measurable in human bodies.

• Central States is one of the largest and most financially stressed multiemployer pension funds in the country. It covers workers in trucking, freight, and dairy. Cuts to benefits in funds like this force retirees to delay or forgo medical care because their fixed income drops below what they need to cover premiums and co-pays.
• Borden Transport Company’s retirees and active workers who paid into the fund faced reduced retirement security because Borden’s $40 million debt was settled at a lower rate, then discharged almost entirely in bankruptcy. The stress of retirement income uncertainty is a documented risk factor for cardiovascular disease, depression, and accelerated cognitive decline in older adults.
• The $128,576 the fund recovered from Borden’s bankruptcy represents a fraction of what was owed. Every dollar not recovered by the fund is a dollar that cannot be used to pay promised benefits. Over time, chronic shortfalls of this kind force funds to reduce benefit levels for all covered workers, not just those connected to the withdrawing employer.

Economic Inequality

This case is a textbook demonstration of how corporate ownership structures function to insulate wealth from obligations to workers, even when the law explicitly requires otherwise.

• The Related Employers in this case are not small businesses. They include Laguna Dairy, S. de R.L. de C.V., a Mexican corporation; Lala Branded Products LLC, a Texas entity formerly known as Lala Branded Products Inc.; Gilsa Real Estate Co. LLC, a Nebraska company; Farmland Dairies LLC (Delaware); Promised Land Dairy LLC (Delaware); Sinton Dairy Foods Company LLC (Colorado); and New Laguna LLC (Delaware). This is a transnational corporate network. The pension claimants are retired truck drivers and dairy workers.
• Two of those entities, Laguna Dairy and New Laguna LLC, negotiated themselves out of the indemnification obligation to Borden during the bankruptcy proceedings through a side agreement the pension fund was not a party to. Corporate entities with access to expensive legal counsel successfully used bankruptcy procedure to reduce their exposure to a labor obligation that less well-resourced retirees had no ability to contest at the table.
• The district court’s initial ruling, which was later reversed, would have created a permanent precedent in Delaware, one of the most corporation-friendly jurisdictions in the country, that settlement agreements struck between a pension fund and a withdrawing employer are not enforceable against commonly controlled entities. That ruling would have directly benefited transnational corporate ownership groups at the direct expense of multiemployer pension funds and their working-class beneficiaries.
• The original $41.6 million obligation was assessed as Borden’s “proportionate share of the plan’s unfunded vested benefits.” When Borden walked away through bankruptcy and the related entities refused to cover the gap, that proportionate share was effectively redistributed onto the remaining employers and workers in the fund, who pay higher contributions or receive reduced benefits to cover the shortfall that Borden and its corporate relatives did not pay.
• The legal fight over this debt has lasted more than a decade. The pension fund had to hire outside law firms, appear before three separate courts (arbitration, district court, and a federal circuit court), and wait until March 2025 just to be allowed to make its case. Corporations defending against this claim had access to Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, one of the most expensive and prestigious corporate law firms in the United States. The workers whose benefits depend on the fund’s success had no seat at any of these proceedings.

The Cost of a Life: What the Numbers Mean at Ground Level

What Now: The Case Continues and So Does the Fight

The Third Circuit’s March 2025 ruling reversed the dismissal and sent the case back to the district court. The fund can now make its case that the Related Employers owe the remaining withdrawal liability. This is not a final victory for the workers. It is the beginning of the next legal chapter.

Key Corporate Decision-Makers

The source material identifies these corporate entities as the Related Employers named in the lawsuit. The individuals holding executive and board-level authority over these entities are not named in the court record. Contact these companies directly through their registered agents to demand accountability:

• Chief Executive Officer and Board of Directors: Laguna Dairy, S. de R.L. de C.V. (formerly Laguna Dairy, S.A. de C.V.) — Mexican corporation, registered in Mexico
• Chief Executive Officer and Board of Directors: Lala Branded Products LLC (formerly Lala Branded Products Inc.) — Texas LLC
• Registered Manager or Governor: Gilsa Real Estate Co. LLC — Nebraska LLC
• Chief Executive Officer and Board of Directors: Farmland Dairies LLC — Delaware LLC
• Chief Executive Officer and Board of Directors: Promised Land Dairy LLC (formerly PL Newco LLC) — Delaware LLC
• Chief Executive Officer and Board of Directors: Sinton Dairy Foods Company LLC — Colorado LLC
• Registered Manager or Governor: New Laguna LLC — Delaware LLC

Regulatory Watchlist

These are the federal bodies with jurisdiction over the conduct described in this case. Contact them. File complaints. Make noise.

• Department of Labor, Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA): Primary federal regulator for ERISA, multiemployer pension funds, and withdrawal liability enforcement. File a complaint about pension fund solvency threats at dol.gov/agencies/ebsa.
• Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC): Federal insurer for private pension plans. The PBGC has authority to intervene in multiemployer plan insolvencies and has issued guidance on withdrawal liability revisions central to this case. Contact via pbgc.gov.
• Department of Justice, Civil Division: ERISA enforcement actions involving fraud or willful noncompliance with pension obligations can be referred to the DOJ.
• U.S. Bankruptcy Court, District of Delaware: The bankruptcy proceedings that produced the $128,576 recovery are public record. Delaware courts handle a disproportionate share of major corporate bankruptcies because of favorable incorporation laws. Monitor ongoing dockets.
• Congress, Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee: Legislative oversight of ERISA and multiemployer pension reform. Contact your senators and demand action on closing the procedural gaps this case exposed.

Mutual Aid, Organizing, and Direct Action

• Connect with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (teamster.org). Central States is a Teamsters-affiliated fund. Retired and active Teamsters members have organized political pressure campaigns around pension solvency for years. The campaign to protect Central States specifically has resulted in federal legislation in the past and needs sustained pressure now.
• Support the Butch Lewis Emergency Pension Relief Act of 2021 and its successors. The American Rescue Plan included multiemployer pension relief provisions directly tied to funds like Central States. Track whether those funds are reaching workers and demand transparency from fund trustees.
• Attend local union meetings and pension trustee meetings. Multiemployer fund trustees are legally required to act as fiduciaries for beneficiaries. Show up, ask questions, and demand full accounting of withdrawal liability collection efforts.
• Organize your co-workers now, before they retire. The power to prevent the next Borden-style exit starts at the shop floor. Workers in controlled-group corporate structures need to understand that their employer’s related companies share liability. Knowing that is leverage.
• If you are a retiree or current worker covered by Central States, contact the fund directly (centralstates.org) to verify your benefit status and ask what steps the fund is taking to collect from the Related Employers in this case.