Edmund J. Harm v. Bay Area Pipe Trades Pension Plan Trust Fund

Appellant Edward Harm, a retired plumber, appeals from the district court’s grant of summary judgment to the Bay Area Pipe Trades Pension Plan Trust Fund. He filed a timely appeal and invokes our authority pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1291 . We affirm.

I.

FACTS

Harm, a member of the United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing and Pipefitting Industry, retired in March 1977. Although he had worked as a plumber for twenty-five years, he was only forty-five. He qualified for the Plan’s service retirement benefit, which authorized employees who had not reached the normal retirement age of sixty-five to receive benefits if they had twenty-five years of credited service. He began receiving benefits of $605.82 per month.

In 1978 Harm moved from Northern California to Carson City, Nevada, where he became sole proprietor of a plumbing business. Harm performed a variety of managerial tasks in his business, but he did not perform any of the fifty-one tasks in the union’s work classifications. The Plan, learning of his activity, suspended his benefits on October 1, 1979. It claimed that its rules required it to suspend the benefits of any service retiree working in the…