Liquor and Allied Workers Local No. 3 Pension Fund

Liquor and Allied Workers Local No. 3 Pension Fund

Established in 1958 and headquartered in River Forest, Illinois, the Liquor and Allied Workers Local No. 3 Pension Fund serves as the retirement vehicle for the Salesmen Division of Local 3, a union affiliate of the United Food and Commercial Workers. As a multiemployer defined-benefit Taft-Hartley plan, governance is shared between union-appointed and contributing-employer trustees. The plan covers distillery industry workers across multiple states, providing pension, disability, and death benefits to participants. The fund pursues a diversified private-markets mandate unusual for a plan of its scale, with manager relationships spanning buyout, distressed debt, venture capital, secondaries, and mezzanine strategies. Its venture exposure reaches from seed and early-stage commitments to expansion and late-stage vehicles, giving the fund indirect participation in a broad innovation landscape. While specific fund commitments and portfolio company names are not public record, the strategy reflects a deliberate allocation to alternatives alongside traditional fixed-income and equity exposures. Total assets are not publicly disclosed by the fund, but an Altss estimate places the figure around $148 million. The plan operates from a single office in River Forest and is administered through union and employer channels rather than a dedicated investment staff. No associated philanthropic foundations or club memberships have been identified, and it does not maintain adjacent real-asset arms or operating subsidiaries under this structure. Structurally, the fund illustrates the Taft-Hartley model's rigidity and resilience — its board composition requires labor and management consensus on investment decisions, effectively governing strategy by negotiation. This design, while not built for rapid allocation shifts, creates a durable fiduciary framework that has persisted across six decades of market cycles.