Welcome to the McCutcheon v. Colgate-Palmolive Co. Class Action Website.  

The parties to this federal pension benefit class action – Plaintiff Rebecca McCutcheon on behalf of herself and the Class (defined below), and Defendants Colgate-Palmolive Co. (“Colgate”), Colgate-Palmolive Co. Employees’ Ret. Income Plan (the “Plan”), the Employee Relations Committee of Colgate-Palmolive Co. (the “Committee”), and two former Committee members (collectively, “Defendants”) – have reached an agreement to settle it.  The lawsuit, filed in 2016, alleged that the Plan failed to pay Class members, as a required supplement to the lump sums that Class members originally received, residual annuities (“RAs”) calculated in accordance with the 2005 Residual Annuity Amendment (the “RAA”) and the federal pension law known as “ERISA” (the Employee Retirement Income Security Act). 

This website, created by Class counsel, is designed to help you understand the proposed settlement, review copies of the relevant documents, and decide whether you believe it is fair, reasonable and adequate under the circumstances and should be approved.

Under the agreement, Defendants will pay a total of $332 million, to be distributed to the 1,177 members of the Class, net of attorney’s fees and expenses approved by the Court, using the amount that Ms. McCutcheon and Class Counsel argued the Plan should be paying you and should have paid you as an annuity (retroactive to your original lump sum payment date, which includes an adjustment for any prior annuity payments you may have received, and any retroactive annuity payment you may have received around 2014), brought forward with interest, minus a pro rata discount in exchange for Defendants’ agreement to settle. 

Plaintiff and Class counsel believe that that the settlement represents an outstanding recovery for Class members in light of the risks of non-recovery or lesser recovery and further extended delay they faced.  Now, instead of the uncertain course of further litigation and additional delay, the settlement provides an expeditious route to certain recovery for all Class members, and the settlement amount is nearly 100% of the residual annuities Plaintiff and Class Counsel claimed they are owed, brought forward with interest until today, calculated exactly as Plaintiff and Class Counsel claimed they should be calculated. 

But the settlement itself will only become effective if finally approved by the Court.

Court approval of a class action is a two-step process.  First, there is “preliminary approval” by the Court which depends on a showing that the settlement is within the range of reasonableness, sufficient to send notice to the Class.  In the Court’s Order of October 8, 2025, it granted preliminary approval of the proposed settlement and authorized Mailed Notice to be sent to members of the Class and Publication Notice to be published in USA Today.

The second step of the settlement process is the “final approval” stage.  In the final approval phase of a proposed class action settlement, the Court takes a much closer look and issues a definitive decision as to whether the proposed settlement is fair, reasonable and adequate.  At the same time, the Court rules on Class counsel’s request for attorney’s fees and any service award requested, as will be the case here, for the named plaintiff for service to the Class.

The Court has set the final approval hearing for January 12, 2026 at 2:30 p.m. 

We will update this site as soon as we have further information from the Court or other information to convey to members of the Classes.