Mattei v. Mattei

• Decision Date: 12 November 1997
• Docket Number: No. 96-5443,96-5443
• Citation: 126 F.3d 794
• Parties: 21 Employee Benefits Cas. 1745, Pens. Plan Guide (CCH) P 23937W Maria MATTEI, Plaintiff-Appellant. v. Ronald MATTEI, Individually and as Executor for the Estate of Louis J. Mattei; Mary Laura Mattei, Defendants-Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Sixth Circuit

Page 794

126 F.3d 794

21 Employee Benefits Cas. 1745,

Pens. Plan Guide (CCH) P 23937W

Maria MATTEI, Plaintiff-Appellant. v. Ronald MATTEI, Individually and as Executor for the Estate of Louis J. Mattei; Mary Laura Mattei Defendants-Appellees.

No. 96-5443.

United States Court of Appeals Sixth Circuit.

Submitted March 18, 1997.

Decided Sept. 25, 1997.

Rehearing and Suggestion for Rehearing En Banc Denied Nov. 12, 1997. ^*

Rehearing Denied Dec. 18, 1997. ^**

Robert W. Griffith (briefed), Michael I. Kanovitz (briefed), Susan C. Reisner (briefed), Stites & Harbison, Louisville, KY, for Plaintiff-Appellant.

Walter L. Sales (briefed), Thomas M. Williams (briefed), Ogden, Newell & Welch, Louisville, KY, for Defendants-Appellees.

Before: MERRITT, KRUPANSKY, and BOGGS, Circuit Judges.

BOGGS, J., delivered the opinion of the court, in which KRUPANSKY, J., joined. MERRITT, J. (pp. 810-11), delivered a separate dissenting opinion.

BOGGS, Circuit Judge.

Maria Mattei ("Mattei" or "Maria") appeals the district court's dismissal with prejudice of her lawsuit brought under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, 29 U.S.C. § 1001 et seq., and its dismissal without prejudice of her pendent state-law claims. We conclude that Mattei has stated a claim cognizable under ERISA, and we reverse.

I

Before Louis J. Mattei married his second wife, Maria, the couple executed an antenuptial agreement. The agreement provided that, in the event Maria survived her husband, she would, for the duration of her life, have the right to live in the marital residence, and would receive from Louis's estate a payment of $300 per week (plus an annual six-percent escalator). In return, she surrendered all other claims to Louis's estate. ¹

Just over a year later, on December 28, 1991, Louis died. His son, Ronald, was appointed executor of the estate. In accordance with the antenuptial agreement, Mattei began receiving her weekly payments. However, a dispute immediately arose over the proper recipient of the death benefits provided by an ERISA-covered pension plan ("the Plan") in which Louis was a participant at his place of employment. Although the antenuptial agreement limited Maria's claims to those mentioned above, the Plan administrator promptly determined, under the provisions of the Plan, that Maria was entitled to the death benefits thereunder, and paid her a lump-sum settlement in February 1993. ² We glean from Mattei's brief that the estate unsuccessfully pursued appeals with the plan administrator regarding that determination.

At the end of the first year of making payments to Mattei, the estate failed to increase Mattei's weekly payments by six percent, as provided by the antenuptial agreement. Then, in December 1994, the estate stopped the weekly payments to Mattei altogether. In November 1995, she filed a complaint in district court against the estate, Ronald (its executor and a legatee under Louis's will), and Mary Laura Mattei (Louis's daughter and a legatee under his will), alleging that the defendants ceased the payments in order to deprive her of the benefits to which she was entitled under the Plan, ³ and in retaliation for her acceptance of those benefits, both in violation of § 510 of ERISA, 29 U.S.C. § 1140, and sought an injunction and damages. The complaint further included a number of pendent allegations under Kentucky law.

II

A

In March 1996, the district court granted the estate's motion to dismiss. In dismissing Mattei's ERISA claim, the district court relied on three rationales: (1) the estate's cessation of the weekly payments did not fall within the statute's list of proscribed actions; (2) the estate was not an entity covered by § 1140; and (3) case law has limited § 1140 to "actions affecting the employer-employee relationship."

"We review de novo a district court's dismissal of a complaint for failure to state a claim under Rule 12(b)(6). We must treat as true all of the well-pleaded allegations of the complaint. All allegations must be construed in the light most favorable to the plaintiff. In order for a dismissal to be proper, it must appear beyond doubt that the plaintiff would not be able to recover under any set of facts that could be presented consistent with the allegations of the complaint." Bower v. Federal Express Corp., 96 F.3d 200, 203 (6th Cir.1996) (citations omitted).

We begin by setting forth the relevant provisions of ERISA. Section 1140 (ERISA § 510) states:

It shall be unlawful for any person to discharge, fine, suspend, expel, discipline, or discriminate against a participant or beneficiary for exercising any right to which he is entitled under the provisions of an employee benefit plan [or by statute] or for the purpose of interfering with the attainment of any right to which such participant may become entitled under the plan [or by statute].... The provisions of section 1132 [ERISA § 502] of this title shall be applicable in the enforcement of this section.[ ⁴

As we shall discuss in detail later, ERISA does not define any of the verbs used in § 1140 ("discharge, fine, suspend, expel, discipline, or discriminate") to describe illegal conduct.

Section 1132(a) is "a carefully integrated civil enforcement scheme that is one of the essential tools for accomplishing the stated purposes of ERISA." Ingersoll-Rand v. McClendon, 498 U.S. 133, 137, 111 S.Ct. 478, 482, 112 L.Ed.2d 474 (1990) (internal quotations and citations omitted); see also Humphreys v. Bellaire Corp., 966 F.2d 1037, 1043 (6th Cir.1992) ("In general, section 1132 [ERISA § 502] authorizes the prosecution of civil suits to enforce substantive rights granted by the statute"). Mattei's lawsuit was brought under § 1132 to enforce her rights as described in § 1140. Section 1132(a) provides, in pertinent part, that:

A civil action may be brought--

(1) by a participant or beneficiary--

...

(B) to recover benefits due to him under the terms of his plan, to enforce his rights under the terms of the plan, or to clarify his rights to future benefits under the terms of the plan; ...

(3) by a participant, beneficiary, or fiduciary (A) to enjoin any act or practice which violates any provision of this subchapter or the terms of the plan, or (B) to obtain other appropriate equitable relief (i) to redress such violations or (ii) to enforce any provisions of this subchapter or the terms of the plan....

Section 1002, ERISA's definitional section, includes the following terms, all of which will be pertinent to our analysis:

(5) The term "employer" means any person acting directly as an employer, or indirectly in the interest of an employer, in relation to an employee benefit plan; and includes a group or association of employers acting for an employer in such capacity.

(6) The term "employee" means any individual employed by an employer.

(7) The term "participant" means any employee or former employee of an employer, or any member or former member of an employee organization, who is or may become eligible to receive a benefit of any type from an employee benefit plan which covers employees of such employer or members of such organization, or whose beneficiaries may be eligible to receive any such benefit.

(8) The term "beneficiary" means a person designated by a participant, or by the terms of an employee benefit plan, who is or may become entitled to a benefit thereunder.

(9) The term "person" means an individual, partnership, joint venture, corporation, mutual company, joint-stock company, trust, estate, unincorporated organization, association, or employee organization.

B

In a case brought under ERISA by an employee who claimed that his employer fired him to prevent his attainment of benefits under an ERISA plan, the Supreme Court stated:

By its terms § 510 protects plan participants from termination motivated by an employer's desire to prevent a pension from vesting. Congress viewed this section as a crucial part of ERISA because, without it, employers would be able to circumvent the provision of promised benefits. S.Rep. No. 93-127, pp. 35-36 (1973); H.R.Rep. No. 93-533, p. 17 (1973). We have no doubt that this claim is prototypical of the kind Congress intended to cover under § 510.

Ingersoll-Rand, 498 U.S. at 143, 111 S.Ct. at 485.

Presaging the Court's identification of the § 510 prototype, this court observed in West v. Butler, 621 F.2d 240, 245 (6th Cir.1980), that "[t]he legislative history [of § 1140] reveals that the prohibitions were aimed primarily at preventing unscrupulous employers from discharging or harassing their employees in order to keep them from obtaining vested pension rights" (emphasis added). It is a bit odd that West is the leading § 1140 case, because its facts are far from "prototypical." As part of a collective bargaining agreement with the Southern Labor Union, certain coal mining companies in Appalachia had established a pension plan funded by a specified financial contribution per ton of coal production. When secondary boycotters (apparently striking members of the United Mine Workers who were attempting to shut down all the coal mines in the eastern United States, 621 F.2d at 242 n. 2) succeeded in severely curtailing coal production by these companies, and, consequently, contributions to the plan, the plan's trustees sued the boycotters under § 1140. They alleged that the boycotters, by indirectly preventing the flow of funds into the pension plan, were interfering with participants' attainment of benefits under the plan.

This court affirmed the district court's dismissal of the complaint, holding that § 1140 does not "allow[ ] pension fund trustees to file civil actions to enjoin secondary picketing." Id. at 241. In reaching that conclusion, the court analyzed the statute as follows:

Congress had a specific type of problem in mind when it enacted sections 510 and 511:

These provisions were added by the Committee in the face of evidence that in some plans a worker's pension rights or the...