Michiana Area Electrical Workers' Pension Plan

Michiana Area Electrical Workers' Pension Plan

The plan was established through collective bargaining between the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) locals in the Michiana region and signatory contractors of the National Electrical Contractors Association (NECA). As a multiemployer defined-benefit plan, it pools contributions from multiple employers on behalf of covered electrical workers, creating a commingled trust that provides retirement income independent of any single contractor's solvency. The geographic footprint centers on South Bend, Elkhart, and the broader industrial corridor bridging the Indiana-Michigan state line, an area with a concentration of manufacturing and construction activity tied to the RV, automotive-supply, and commercial real-estate sectors. The fund's investment portfolio is overseen by the joint board of trustees, typically advised by an institutional investment consultant. Allocations follow a classic pension diversification model, with core public-market exposures across domestic and international equities, investment-grade and high-yield fixed income, and real assets including core real estate and infrastructure. Private-market sleeves — which can include private equity, private credit, and real estate funds — are generally accessed through commingled funds and fund-of-funds structures rather than direct co-investments, reflecting the governance capacity of a mid-sized union plan. The consultant relationship is the central operational lever: the board sets asset-class targets within a liability-driven framework, and the consultant sources, screens, and monitors external managers. While individual manager lineups are not publicly disclosed by the fund, plan documents typically reference partnership with a field consultant such as Segal Marco, NEPC, or a regional Midwestern advisory firm. Total assets under management and participant counts are not publicly disclosed by the fund, and the plan files limited public reports beyond what ERISA Form 5500 obligations require. In the most recently available Form 5500 filings — accessible via the Department of Labor's EFAST database — multiemployer plans in this peer set generally report assets in the low-to-mid hundreds of millions of dollars, supporting several hundred active participants and retiree beneficiaries. The plan's trustee structure is fixed by the Taft-Hartley statute, with equal representation from union and management trustees who meet quarterly to review investment performance, actuarial funding levels, and administrative operations. No known affiliated philanthropic foundation or hybrid wealth-management entity exists. The plan's structural differentiator lies in its governance model: the joint trusteeship forces consensus between labor and management fiduciaries, a dynamic that typically privileges steady, consultant-validated allocations over opportunistic or thematic tilts. This architecture makes the fund an attractive long-horizon allocator for core and core-plus strategies but a slow adopter of emerging-manager programs or niche alternatives. For GPs targeting mid-sized union pension plans in the Midwest, the entry point is almost always the field consultant retained by the board, not the trustees directly.