In 1974 Gerald Ford signed the employee retirement income security act into law in the rose garden on labor day. It was truly a momentous occasion.
If you’re old enough to remember what was happening in the economy back in the 70’s, you might remember that we had a lot of small, regional employers. And then all of a sudden the economy started really growing. We had employers who had employees in multiple states. The ability to treat them all uniformly became a real problem so we didn’t want a system where an employee in Ohio who worked for the same corporation claimed less benefit than the employee in New York. And so ERISA was the answer.
ERISA was a law that preempted all state laws on employee benefits. It created a uniformed system of taxation and generated one body of law to help understand the complex world of employee benefits. Especially for employers who were in multiple states.
