PROFESSOR SAMANTHA PRINCE TO PRESENT AT THE 2024 AALS ANNUAL MEETING
November 2023 — Professor Samantha Prince has been invited to speak on a panel entitled “Emerging Issues in Retirement Equity” at the Association of American Law Schools’ Annual Meeting in January 2024. The program is being sponsored by the AALS Sections on Employee Benefits and Executive Compensation, Aging and the Law, Poverty Law, and Minority Groups.
Professor Prince will be presenting her work on retirement plan vesting schedule use (abuse) by high turnover businesses and the inequities resulting therefrom. The presentation will primarily consist of research from her article, “Megacompany Employee Churn Meets 401(k) Vesting Schedules: A Sabotage on Workers’ Retirement Wealth,” which was published as the lead article in the Yale Law & Policy Review in November 2022.
The “Megacompany” article describes how vesting schedules negatively impact the ability of American workers to adequately save for retirement. The article reveals alarming data on the number of predominately low-income workers that are terminating employment before becoming vested in their employer-provided benefits. For example, in 2021 Amazon and Home Depot recorded 236,751 and 129,766 participants terminating employment prior to becoming vested in the matching contributions made by the company on their behalf, respectively. This crisis has the potential to exacerbate existing class and race-based disparities in intergenerational wealth accumulation. Professor Prince was also interviewed on the Business Scholarship Podcast on this topic.
Professor Prince will be presenting her work on retirement plan vesting schedule use (abuse) by high turnover businesses and the inequities resulting therefrom. The presentation will primarily consist of research from her article Megacompany Employee Churn Meets 401(k) Vesting Schedules: A Sabotage on Workers’ Retirement Wealth which was published as the lead article in the Yale Law & Policy Review in November 2022. The “Megacompany” article describes how vesting schedules negatively impact the ability of American workers to adequately save for retirement. The article reveals alarming data on the number of predominately low-income workers that are terminating employment before becoming vested in their employer-provided benefits. For example, in 2021 Amazon and Home Depot recorded 236,751 and 129,766 participants terminating employment prior to becoming vested in the matching contributions made by the company on their behalf, respectively. This crisis has the potential to exacerbate existing class and race-based disparities in intergenerational wealth accumulation.
Professor Prince was also interviewed on the Business Scholarship Podcast on this topic.
Professor Samantha Prince is an Assistant Professor of Law and Director of Legal Analysis & Writing at Dickinson Law. She has a Master of Laws in Taxation from Georgetown University Law Center and was a partner in a regional law firm where she handled transactional matters that ranged from an initial public offering to regular representation of a publicly-traded company. Most of her clients were small to medium sized businesses and entrepreneurs, including start-ups. A significant part of her practice was in employee benefits including retirement plan design and operation. An expert in entrepreneurship law, she established the Dickinson Law entrepreneurship program, is an advisor for the Entrepreneurship Law Certificate that is available to students, and is the founder and moderator of the Inside Entrepreneurship Law blog. Her research mainly comprises the changing world of work.