UFCW Local 1262 Pension Fund

UFCW Local 1262 Pension Fund

The UFCW Local 1262 and Employers Pension Fund was established in 1964 as the retirement vehicle for members of the New Jersey-based local of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. Harvey Whille leads the board as president of the local and chairperson of the trustees, with secretary-treasurer John Colella and recorder Michael DeMartino rounding out the plan's key governance roles alongside benefits administrator Betty Laughery. The plan covers UFCW members working across supermarkets, food processing plants, and retail shops throughout northern New Jersey. The pension fund allocates across a broad private-markets program that includes buyout, growth equity, venture capital, mezzanine debt, and natural resources strategies, as well as secondary and special-situations mandates. The fund invests primarily through limited-partner commitments to external managers rather than pursuing direct co-investments or in-house deal sourcing. While the plan does not publicly disclose individual general-partner relationships, peer Taft-Hartley plans of comparable size typically maintain a concentrated roster of middle-market and large-cap fund sponsors. The geographic scope is predominantly domestic, with the fund's marketable-securities portfolio managed from the Clifton headquarters. The plan's most recent publicly available financial filings indicate total assets in the range of $968 million (Altss estimate), placing it among the mid-sized Taft-Hartley defined-benefit plans. The fund operates out of the union's headquarters at 1389 Broad Street in Clifton, New Jersey, with no additional investment offices. The union also sponsors a health and welfare fund — managed by Betty Laughery — and an annual scholarship program for members' families, both of which are legally and operationally distinct from the pension plan. In May 2024, the plan continued its cycle of trustee meetings and actuarial reviews consistent with ERISA-defined benefit plan governance requirements (per the plan's regulatory posture). The pension fund's structure as a multiemployer Taft-Hartley plan is its defining structural feature: it pools contributions from numerous unionized employers in the food and retail sectors to create a collectively bargained retirement asset pool. This negotiated-contribution model means that the asset base grows through collectively bargained hourly contributions rather than discretionary allocations from a single family or corporate sponsor, which shapes the investment posture toward steady, diversified fund commitments with an emphasis on actuarial return targets rather than concentrated opportunistic bets.