W. Daniel “Dee” Miles III, of Beasley Allen Law Firm. (Courtesy photo)

A lawsuit on behalf of former DuPont employees saying their retirement benefits are in jeopardy because of the company's merger with Dow Chemical has been filed in federal court.

The putative class action, Thondukolam v. Corteva Inc., was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on July 3, on behalf of more than 100,000 people, including retirees and beneficiaries in the pension plan.

Lawyers from Beasley Allen of Atlanta—W. Daniel “Dee” Miles, III, head of the firm's consumer fraud section, and James Eubank—are working with a legal team that includes: Elizabeth Hopkins of Kantor & Kantor in Northridge, California; Thomas Sinclair and Rebecca Gilliland of Sinclair Law Firm in Birmingham, Alabama; and Edward Stone of Edward Stone Law in Greenwich, Connecticut.

“Workers for DuPont have given decades of their working lives to the company to secure a pension for retirement that they were promised. These companies are now attempting to find ways to not only avoid funding the plan, but also are placing it in jeopardy of failing, leaving the workers with little or no pension after a lifetime of savings,” Miles said in a news release.

The company did not have an immediate response.

“Nearly two years ago, The Dow Chemical Company merged with the 217-year-old E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, one of the oldest companies in the United States. The combined entity, DowDuPont, was the largest chemical conglomerate in the world. The two historical companies had intended and planned from the beginning to separate into three wholly independent companies and move the Plan to one of the newly formed companies,” the complaint said.

“Barely a year later more details on the plan were finally released when, on November 1, 2018, Ed Breen, CEO of DowDuPont, announced that the Plan, along with Historical DuPont, were moving to a company with the trade name Corteva Agriscience … a spin-off purely focused on agriculture. The existence of Historical DuPont, the Plan's sponsor for more than a century and the company for whom the plan participants worked, would be mostly nominal, as all of the assets and business lines of that company other than its agricultural businesses would stay with the New DuPont or the New Dow, while all of its pension liabilities, along with tremendous litigation liabilities, would transfer,” the complaint added.

The liability of the DuPont U.S. Pension plan is approximately $19 billion, according to the complaint. The retirees alleged that Corteva, which solely focuses on agriscience business, understates its liabilities, including income fluctuations due to weather, global trade and other factors beyond the company's control.

Also, the retirees said, the agriscience business involves the manufacture of chemicals already subject to large-scale litigation, the liability for which was also transferred to Corteva. The retirees contend that, under Corteva, the pension plan is underfunded and uses overly optimistic estimates. Now that Corteva, Dow, and DuPont are three separate companies, Corteva can file for bankruptcy and discharge its responsibility to fund the promised pensions, leaving retirees to receive pennies on the dollar, and neither DuPont nor Dow would be affected by such a bankruptcy, the plaintiffs claim.

Miles estimated the pension plan could be underfunded by $5 billion.

“While all of this happened, DuPont assured pensioners that their retirement was well funded and safe,” Miles said. He said the plan was, “already in a downward funding spiral” and is “now left with an empty shell company as a plan sponsor, linked to a newly formed company that is also saddled with all of the environmental and agricultural liabilities of the historical Dow/DuPont companies.”