By Jennifer Bjorhus and Jim Spencer

Ken Petersen spent 30 years as a Teamster trucker, loading and hauling utility poles, fertilizer and other freight. All those years his employers socked money away for the monthly pension check Petersen has received since he retired from trucking in 2003.

Now, to save the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund from collapse, its trustees want to slash the pensions of 272,600 fund members, nearly 15,000 of whom are Minnesotan. Thousands are already retired and living on the pensions.

Petersen, 65, and working in a South St. Paul elementary school to make ends meet, said his monthly pretax retirement check would be chopped from $2,550 to $1,274.

“The best word we could come up with is ‘betrayal,’ “ he said.

The $17 billion Central States fund is the first to seek cutbacks under the 2014 Multiemployer Pension Reform Act. The controversial law, affixed by parliamentary maneuver to a budget bill by Republican Rep. John Kline of Minnesota and former Democratic Rep. George Miller of California, allows certain financially stressed plans to cut benefits already being paid to retirees.

It’s a radical shift from long-standing federal laws safeguarding private pensions, which prohibit ongoing plans from cutting benefits that have already accrued. The new law creates an exception.

The cuts must be approved by the U.S. Treasury Department, but the agency is required to do so if the pension fund trustees meet certain requirements. The Teamsters get to vote on the deal, but if the requirements are met, Treasury has to approve the cuts regardless of the vote’s outcome.

Some worry that approval will lead to a wave of actions by other pension funds, jeopardizing the retirements of hundreds of thousands of people in multiemployer plans and setting the stage for additional legislation that extends to single-employer pensions.

“This is the worst challenge we have seen in our entire existence,” said Karen Friedman of the Pension Rights Center, an advocacy group for retired workers.

Many of the 272,600 affected Central States fund members are, like Petersen, former truckers. (People over 80 and those who retired with a Central States disability pension are shielded from reductions.) More than a third of those affected already are retired and living on their pensions. The average cut nationally is 34 percent, although some cuts top 60 percent or more.