The Non-Financial Ledger: What the Courtroom Doesn’t Measure

There is a specific kind of person who does asbestos abatement work. They are not the ones who installed the asbestos. That generation of workers came before, decades ago, when manufacturers and builders used the material in everything — roofing, insulation, fireproofing, flooring, cement piping, the walls themselves. That generation is gone now, many of them dead from mesothelioma and lung cancer. The workers who come next are the ones left to undo the damage. They suit up in respirators and protective gear, they seal off rooms with polyethylene sheeting, they scrape and grind and demolish materials that will kill them if the fibers get loose. They do this inside occupied buildings. They do this so that other people can live and work without breathing poison.

These are the workers at the center of this case. Walker Specialty Construction employed them in southern Nevada. Every day they showed up to job sites and removed asbestos from walls, ceilings, floors, and roofing materials. They used chemical solvents to break down contaminated structures. They demolished drywall loaded with the stuff. They pulled out carpets and wall coverings and interior finishes not because anyone was remodeling for aesthetics, but because the building was not safe to occupy until those materials were gone.

None of that context appeared in the Trust’s argument. The Trust — the pension fund that existed specifically to provide retirement security to these workers and others like them — looked at what Walker’s employees did every day and decided that it wasn’t construction. Tearing things down is not building things up. The people who remove the cancer from your building are, in the Trust’s legal theory, outside the protected category. They don’t form, make, or build a structure. They undo one. So when Walker stopped operating in Nevada in 2019 and the Trust wanted nearly three million dollars, the framing it chose was: these workers don’t count as real construction workers.

This is the part that doesn’t show up in the financial ledger. It doesn’t show up in the arbitration award or the circuit court opinion. The workers themselves are not parties to this lawsuit. They appear only as a classification, a legal category, a set of job duties described in corporate filings. The question before the court was whether their employer owed money to a pension fund. The workers’ retirement — the actual point of a pension — was not the live issue. The live issue was whether the fund could collect from a company that no longer operates in the state.

And the fund’s argument, stripped of its legal language, was this: the kind of work these people did every day — hazardous, skilled, physically demanding labor that made buildings safe for human occupation — was not the right kind of construction work to qualify for the exception. The distinction mattered to the tune of $2,837,953.

The court ultimately ruled for the employer. Walker pays nothing. The Trust returns the partial payments Walker already made, plus interest. The workers whose labor generated this entire dispute are not mentioned in the outcome. They are not benefited by the ruling and they are not harmed by it in a direct, traceable way. They exist in this case as a legal abstraction. That is, perhaps, the most accurate summary of how the American legal system processes the lives of hazardous-material workers: as a variable in a funding formula, not as people who spent years breathing the air closest to asbestos to keep someone else’s building standing.

Legal Receipts: The Exact Words They Used

Every quote below is taken verbatim from the court record. Nothing is paraphrased. Read what the Trust argued, what the arbitrator decided, and what the Ninth Circuit ultimately found.

Receipt 1: The Trust’s Formal Position

“Building and construction involves ‘forming, making or building a structure,’ and asbestos abatement does not qualify because it involves ‘tearing down structures rather than building or making them.'” — Board of Trustees of the Construction Industry and Laborers Joint Pension Trust, as quoted in the Ninth Circuit Opinion, No. 24-1560

• This is the Trust’s central legal argument. It attempted to define “construction” as exclusively the act of building something new, and used that definition to disqualify the workers it was supposed to represent from a legal protection designed for workers exactly like them.
• The argument ignores that asbestos abatement does not merely tear things down; it involves demolishing hazardous materials to enable the reuse, renovation, or safe habitation of existing structures — a process the court later found to be substantively indistinguishable from other accepted forms of construction work.

Receipt 2: The Arbitrator’s Definition

“Work in the construction industry is ‘the provision of labor whereby materials and constituent parts may be combined on the building site to form, make or build a structure’ and Walker’s work ‘does not fit within that definition.'” — Arbitrator’s ruling, as quoted in the Ninth Circuit Opinion, No. 24-1560

• The arbitrator adopted the narrowest possible reading of “construction,” one that the Ninth Circuit later found was an incomplete and misleading fragment of the full National Labor Relations Board definition — taken out of context to exclude the rest of the NLRB’s settled meaning.
• The full NLRB definition, established in the 1960s and reaffirmed repeatedly, explicitly includes maintenance, repair, alteration, and demolition. The arbitrator cited only the “form, make, or build” language while discarding the broader context that surrounded it.

Receipt 3: What the NLRB Actually Said

“Construction covers the erection, maintenance and repair . . . of immobile structures and utilities . . . which become integral parts of structures and are essential to their use for any general purpose.” Additionally, “construction includes new work, additions, alterations, and repairs.” — National Labor Relations Board, Carpet, Linoleum and Soft Tile Local Union No. 1247 (Indio Paint & Rug Ctr.), 156 N.L.R.B. 951, 957-958 (1966)

• This is the full definition the Trust’s arbitrator selectively quoted from. The NLRB established this meaning more than a decade before Congress enacted the MPPAA in 1980, meaning Congress was presumed to know it when writing the pension law’s exemption.
• The Ninth Circuit ruled that using only the “form, make, or build” fragment while ignoring “maintenance,” “repair,” “alterations,” and the essential-to-usability standard was legally indefensible. The Trust’s entire case depended on citing part of a definition and pretending the rest didn’t exist.

Receipt 4: Congressional Intent, Confirmed in Writing

“A congressional committee report about the MPPAA noted that it intended for the term to ‘be given the same meaning as has developed in administration of the Taft-Hartley Act.'” — H.R. Rep. No. 96-869, pt. 1, at 76 (1980), cited in the Ninth Circuit Opinion, No. 24-1560

• Congress wrote this down. The committee report accompanying the MPPAA explicitly instructed that “building and construction industry” should be read the same way the NLRB had been reading it under the Taft-Hartley Act for over a decade before 1980.
• The Trust argued — before a federal appellate court — against the recorded intent of the Congress that passed the law the Trust was enforcing. The court found that argument unavailing.

Receipt 5: Why the Ninth Circuit Rejected Every Counter-Argument

“Because we infer that Congress incorporated the NLRB’s interpretation of the term into the MPPAA, we cannot define the term more narrowly than Congress intended.” — Judge Roopali H. Desai, writing for the Ninth Circuit panel, No. 24-1560 (filed January 5, 2026)

• This sentence directly addresses the Trust’s argument that exceptions to statutes should be read narrowly. The court agreed that exceptions are typically narrow — but ruled that “narrow” still means what Congress said it means, not a further restriction the Trust invented.
• The court also explicitly addressed the Trust’s attempt to use the Supreme Court’s 2024 Loper Bright decision (which overturned Chevron deference to agencies) as a weapon against the NLRB’s definition. The Ninth Circuit ruled that Loper Bright is irrelevant: the court was not deferring to the NLRB under Chevron; it was applying standard statutory interpretation to what Congress plainly intended.

Societal Impact Mapping

Public Health

The underlying work in this case is asbestos abatement. That work exists because asbestos is a proven human carcinogen — one that causes mesothelioma, lung cancer, asbestosis, and other fatal diseases, often with a latency period of 10 to 50 years between exposure and diagnosis.

• Asbestos-containing materials, per the court record, are embedded in building insulation, roofing, flooring, walls, cement piping, and fireproofing. These are not niche or rare components; they are structural elements of tens of millions of American buildings constructed before modern regulations.
• Walker’s workers used scraping, grinding, chemical solvents, and demolition to remove these materials. Each of those methods, if improperly executed, can release asbestos fibers into the air — where they are invisible, odorless, and lethal if inhaled.
• The court opinion notes that Walker’s abatement work “ensures that the buildings are usable without any hazard to occupants’ health.” The legal framing is dry, but the health reality is not: without this work, the buildings remained hazardous to every person inside them.
• Asbestos abatement workers themselves face ongoing occupational exposure risk. The workers in this case are not identified individually; they appear in the record only as a workforce classification. Their long-term health outcomes are not part of the litigation.
• The Trust’s argument — that abatement workers are not doing “real” construction — carried an implicit public health cost. If accepted, it would have created a legal incentive for construction employers to classify asbestos removal workers as outside the pension protection system, increasing turnover and reducing the professional standards that keep abatement work safe.

Economic Inequality

The $2,837,953 figure at the center of this case is not just a corporate accounting dispute. It sits inside a system where hazardous-labor workers are structurally disadvantaged at every stage of the economic relationship.

• Multiemployer pension plans like the Trust’s exist precisely because construction work is transient — workers move between employers, and no single company employs them long enough to fund a solo pension. The multiemployer structure was designed to protect workers in exactly this situation. The legal dispute in this case is between two corporate entities, while the workers the plan was meant to protect are absent from the courtroom.
• Walker was required under ERISA to continue making quarterly payments on the disputed $2,837,953 liability even while the legal challenge was pending. This means a company contesting a legal classification had to pay first and litigate second — a cash-flow dynamic that disadvantages smaller employers and creates pressure to settle rather than fight.
• The Trust’s legal theory would have classified asbestos abatement as outside the “building and construction industry” — a classification that, if adopted more broadly, could have subjected similar workers’ employers to withdrawal liability across the country, potentially making hazardous-abatement contracting economically unsustainable in multiemployer plan jurisdictions.
• The Ninth Circuit noted that the 2nd Circuit and 8th Circuit had already taken the same broad view of “building and construction industry” in related pension cases. The Trust’s narrow theory was already a minority legal position nationally, yet it still required Walker to fund expensive litigation through three separate proceedings: Trust review, arbitration, district court, and federal appeal.
• The workers who contributed to the Trust’s fund while employed by Walker are not parties to this case. If Walker prevails and owes nothing, the Trust’s unfunded obligations — if any exist — fall on other contributing employers and their workers. The ruling resolves who owes what, but it does not create any mechanism to ensure the fund’s long-term solvency or the workers’ eventual retirement security.

The “Cost of a Life” Metric

This case turned on a single number and what it would have cost workers’ employers — and by extension, the broader labor ecosystem — if the Trust’s narrow definition had prevailed.

What Now? Who to Watch, What to Demand

This ruling is now binding precedent across the Ninth Circuit. What it does and does not fix are two separate conversations — and only one of them involves lawyers.

The People Running the System

The source document does not disclose the individual identities of the Trust’s Board of Trustees members. The entities accountable for this legal fight are:

• Board of Trustees of the Construction Industry and Laborers Joint Pension Trust for Southern Nevada — the governing body that assessed the $2,837,953 liability, reaffirmed it after Walker’s challenge, and appealed to the Ninth Circuit after losing in district court.
• The Construction Industry and Laborers Pension Trust for Southern Nevada — the plan itself, a co-defendant in the Ninth Circuit appeal.
• Legal representation for the Trust: Adam P. Segal, Christopher M. Humes, and William D. Nobriga of Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck LLP, Las Vegas, Nevada.
• Legal representation for Walker: Ryan C. Curtis and David L. Sieck of Fennemore Craig PC, Phoenix, Arizona.
• Amicus Curiae: the Association of General Contractors of America, represented by Andrew J. Martone of Martone Legal LLC — a national industry group that filed a brief supporting Walker’s position.

Regulatory Watchlist

• Department of Labor (DOL) / Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA): The federal agency responsible for overseeing multiemployer pension plans under ERISA. If you work in construction and are contributing to a multiemployer plan, EBSA is the body that can audit fund trustees for fiduciary compliance and investigate whether the fund is being managed in workers’ interests.
• National Labor Relations Board (NLRB): The agency whose 1960s rulings ultimately decided this case. The NLRB’s administrative definitions of “building and construction industry” under Taft-Hartley now carry binding weight in MPPAA pension disputes throughout the Ninth, Second, and Eighth Circuits.
• Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC): The federal insurer of last resort for pension plans. If the Trust faces solvency issues as a result of losing withdrawal liability claims — and this ruling may not be the last such challenge — the PBGC is the institution workers need to monitor.
• Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA): The federal agency responsible for asbestos exposure standards. OSHA’s regulations govern the exact work Walker’s employees performed every day. If asbestos abatement contractors face financial pressure because of pension law disputes, worker safety compliance is the first thing that gets cut.
• Environmental Protection Agency (EPA): The EPA regulates asbestos under the Toxic Substances Control Act and the Clean Air Act. Asbestos abatement work that is improperly performed is an environmental hazard as well as an occupational one.

What You Can Do

• If you are a construction worker in the Ninth Circuit contributing to a multiemployer pension plan: Request your plan’s annual funding notice, which trustees are legally required to provide. This document tells you whether the plan is in “critical,” “endangered,” or healthy status. Underfunded plans create the exact financial pressure that leads to disputes like this one.
• If you do asbestos abatement, lead remediation, or other hazardous-material work: Know that the Ninth Circuit has now explicitly ruled your work qualifies as “building and construction industry” labor under federal law. This classification affects your employer’s pension obligations, your union bargaining position, and potentially your eligibility for other construction-industry legal protections.
• Support your local building trades union: The multiemployer pension system that sits at the center of this case only functions when enough contributing employers are in the plan. Union organizing in hazardous-materials abatement trades directly strengthens the fund’s base of contributors and reduces the structural pressure that leads to disputes like this one.
• File a complaint with EBSA if you believe your multiemployer pension fund trustees are mismanaging plan assets, pursuing legally aggressive collection strategies that harm contributing employers, or failing to act in participants’ interests. The EBSA complaint process is free and does not require a lawyer.
• Follow the Pension Rights Center (pensionrights.org) for ongoing coverage of multiemployer pension plan solvency, federal legislation, and workers’ rights in the pension system. This case is one data point in a much larger national crisis over pension fund funding shortfalls.