My father was a route salesman for a bread company. He drove a bread truck and sold bread, buns, and cupcakes to grocery stores and restaurants. He worked hard, and in return the company he worked for rewarded him and people like him with a pension plan. He paid in some money from each paycheck. The bread company matched his contribution. In time he was supposed to retire with a regular paycheck and would be able to live comfortably in his declining years.
Then the company he worked for was bought out by a larger company. He was a valued employee so the new bread company kept him on after the sale was complete. His pension did not survive the buyout. The new company's bottom line was more important than rewarding long-time employees. The money that he had in the pension plane was given to him, and he used that money to pay off some debts, but the prospect of having a regular pension check in his retirement was now history.
As a result, my father worked as long as he could, and when declining health forced him to retire, he put together a meager living as best as he could. He took his Social Security checks and added a few dollars here and a few dollars there from anywhere he could. He picked strawberries. He bought truckloads of watermelons that he sold from the back of his pickup. He did odd jobs at a warehouse that stocked gimme hats, Arkansas Razorback blankets, and assorted odds and ends that I usually dub "useless crap." He survived, but he worked until he absolutely could not work any more. Then his health went into a rapid downward spiral and he died. This was his reward for a lifetime of dedication and hard work with a company. He was loyal. The company was not.
Now I am the adult and I have spent the last twenty years of my life working in education. I am a teacher. I hold two BA degrees and a Master's degree plus 57 hours of additional graduate work. In the business community that comes with monetary rewards. In education, it means you make a little more than the run of the mill teacher, but still it is not as much as someone with similar credentials would be paid in private industry. In return I have been promised a pension. I pay a percentage of my paycheck into the pension every payday and the school system and the school system matches this with their own contribution. As a teacher and public employee, I do not pay into the Social Security System. The public pension is to be my retirement.
The trouble is that now there is a movement afoot to do to me and my colleagues in public employment what that bread company did to my father. They want to take away my pension, or at least reduce it seriously. Why? It's considered too expensive. Why? Nobody in the public sector gets this, why should you? Why? Part of it is funded through taxes and nobody wants to pay their taxes to fund somebody else's comfort. Frankly, part of it is a misery loves company impulse. We've gotten nothing from life and you shouldn't get anything either.
Ron Lieber, in a recent New York Times piece, calls it class warfare. Mr. Lieber, taking a cue from the Republican Party playbook has framed his argument by using Marxist terminology, only turning it on its head. Instead of the working poor as the have-nots and the bourgeoisie as the haves, he refers to all government employees with their pensions as the haves and the private industry sorts with their tanking 401-Ks as the have-nots. He goes further to suggest that it's about time that all of us overpaid and over-pensioned government employees should just suck it up because the politicians are going to shove smaller pensions or no pensions at all down our throats. He suggests that those of us who elected to take smaller salaries, who expected a retirement reward down the road are asking too much of the public to follow through on what they promised.
Let's get to the meat of the matter, though. A lot of what has precipitated this crisis is the shortfall in funding in government pension systems due to large numbers of baby boomers suddenly retiring coupled with a recession that has caused a shortfall in tax revenues. What caused this shortfall in funding of the pension systems? First and foremost, let us not say that it is because it was unrealistic in the first place. Everyone knew that there were going to be a lot of boomer retiring. The problem resulted because of massive mismanagement on the part of governmental units that did not hold up their end of the bargain. In the state of Illinois it has been routine practice to raid the money that should go to pension funds every time there is a fiscal crisis. Raise taxes to meet the budget shortfall? Heavens no! Legislators might lose votes in the next election if they did that. Instead, they chose to use money that was supposed to go to pension funds. And now, duh, there's a shortfall in the pension funds. Whose fault is that? That of teachers and other government employees? Not on your life. It's directly the fault of pandering legislators and of citizens who feel no responsibility to the society as a whole.
Now a whole generation of teachers, policemen, firemen, and various other government employees are in danger of losing their pensions because they entered into a contract with the government, and in most cases they won't even have the little income that Social Security offers because as a public employee who pays into a public pension fund you do not pay into Social Security. These are employees who worked their entire adult lives in good faith that if they did their parts, the government, representative of the public at large would do their part when the time came. Well now the time has come and the politicians and large numbers of people in the general public want to renege.
Mr. Lieber in the recent New York Times article from the business pages suggested that we, as public employees were not thinking about the public at large and were being litigious. Well, Mr. Lieber, we contend that it is the public at large that is not thinking about us. We teach your children. We protect your streets. We put out the fires. We pick up your garbage. We manage your society. We gave of ourselves. We gave up the possibility of higher pay for a delayed reward. Now it is your turn to pay up. This was not a gentleman's agreement. It was a contract. We have rights and protections under a constitutional government. Should the government as a representative of the public at large choose to negate that contract, we will exercise our constitutional rights. We don't have 401-Ks. We don't have Social Security. What else can we do?
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