In my case of a similar problem, instead of using Andrew‘s suggestion for the fix, it worked simply after I introduced <pluginManagement> tag to the pom.xml in question.

It looks like that error is due to a missing <pluginManagement> tag. So, in order to avoid the exceptions in Eclipse, it looks like one needs to simply enclose all the plugin tags inside a <pluginManagement> tag, like so:

<build>
    <pluginManagement>
        <plugins>
            <plugin> ... </plugin>
            <plugin> ... </plugin>
                  ....
        </plugins>
    </pluginManagement>
</build>

Once this structure is in place, the error goes away.