In 2009, the vice president of human resources for a Norwalk high-tech manufacturing company began to feel uncomfortable about the status of the pension program he was responsible for overseeing.
Worried that Trans-Lux Corp’s. pension fund was underfunded, and that a missed contribution was not reported to the federal government, Richard Kramer was also concerned that there were supposed to be three executives on the company’s pension committee, but there were only two. When Kramer, a Weston resident who had been with the company for 18 years, voiced these concerns to his bosses, he got nowhere. So he alerted the federal government. As a result, Kramer claims, he was fired last year. Shortly afterward, he filed an employment retaliation claim in U.S. District Court in Connecticut.
