The company ignored the lawsuit – and the court made it pay for that too
A South Dakota masonry company owes over $1 million after walking away from a multiemployer pension plan and ignoring the lawsuit that followed.
On March 26, 2026, a federal judge in Washington, D.C. entered a default judgment against West River Masonry, Inc. in favor of the Bricklayers & Trowel Trades International Pension Fund, ordering the company to pay $1,061,775.49 in unpaid withdrawal liability, interest, liquidated damages, and legal costs – with interest continuing to accrue at 15% per year on the unpaid withdrawal liability until it is paid.
The case lays out what can go wrong when an employer exits a multiemployer pension plan and does not follow through on the financial obligations that come with it.
West River Masonry, a company in the masonry and concrete industry, had been contributing to the pension fund under a collective bargaining agreement with Local Union 1 Minnesota/North Dakota/South Dakota. Those contributions were tied to the hours worked by its employees in covered employment. At the end of 2023, the company stopped participating in the plan. Under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, that move triggered a withdrawal liability – essentially, the employer's share of the plan's unfunded vested benefits.
An actuary calculated that liability at $867,846. The pension fund notified West River in December 2023 and set up a payment schedule. West River missed payments due in February and April 2024. By May 2024, the fund formally told the company it was in default. West River did make seven partial payments totaling about $28,500, but that barely dented the balance. Six payments remained overdue.
The pension fund filed suit in April 2025. West River did not respond – not to the complaint, not to the entry of default, and not to the motion for default judgment. That silence proved costly. Because the company never showed up to contest the case, the court accepted the fund's allegations as true and moved straight to calculating what was owed.
The final tally came to $839,312.39 in unpaid withdrawal liability, $41,965.62 in interest, $167,862.48 in liquidated damages – capped at 20% of the unpaid balance under federal law – and $12,635 in attorney's fees and costs. Judge Dabney L. Friedrich also ordered that interest would keep accruing at 15% per year on the unpaid withdrawal liability until the company pays up.
The court noted that the pension fund actually went easy on its calculations. It applied all of West River's partial payments directly to the principal instead of splitting them between interest and principal, which lowered the total. It also started the interest clock more than a year later than it was entitled to under the parties' agreements, trimming its claim further.
For HR professionals and benefits administrators, the case is a practical reminder of the financial weight that multiemployer pension plan withdrawals carry. Withdrawal liability is not a negotiable suggestion – it is a federally mandated obligation tied to the plan's funding status and the employer's contribution history. When an employer stops contributing and continues to do covered work in the same jurisdiction, the liability kicks in automatically.
The penalties for ignoring it are stacked: the unpaid amount, double-digit interest, liquidated damages, and legal fees. And as this case shows, not engaging with the process does not make the obligation go away – it removes any chance of contesting the numbers.
