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.