As the attacks on public employee retirement benefits continue in full force, we must be on our guard not to allow the opposition to divide rank-and-file workers from retirees. This tactic is a variation on the theme of stoking private-sector worker anger against civil servants on account of the latter’s retirement benefits (what some cynically label as “pension envy”) – anger which redoubles when cuts to public services are then threatened as a result of maintaining such benefits.
A recent editorial from the Marin Independent Journal – only one of many such pieces that abound in the press – illustrates the shape this tactic may assume: “The reality of laying off workers to have enough money to pay those who are no longer working should be troubling to local taxpayers.” Note here the author’s clever equation of the interest of active public employees with that of private-sector taxpayers in an attempt to make both groups believe that it is the retired public servant who is their common enemy. This cannot be allowed.
There has always existed a potential tension – or “tradeoff” if you like – between wages and retirement benefits: more of one necessarily entails less of the other. Indeed, public-sector retirement systems found their very origins in the thought that because service to the public could never be remunerated at anything approaching the level of private-sector compensation, retired public servants should not have to spend their golden years in penury. The less you made, the more you deserved a pension, or so the thinking seemed to go.
Contrary to what some may believe, this tension never abated, even during the economic boom times when wage increases as well as retirement benefit enhancements were simultaneously achievable. More of one necessarily resulted in less of the other, resulting in a dynamic which could potentially divide older from younger, retiree versus active employee, veteran versus rookie, etc. As I wrote in the pages of another POA’s monthly journal nearly ten years ago in a vastly different economic world, “I have urged the membership at some of our recent meetings to begin having what I call the ‘intergenerational conversation’ now. There needs to occur an extended dialogue between younger officers who often place their highest priority on a pay raise and older officers who will probably be the strongest champions of attaining the [90%-of final-average-salary retirement] cap.” Such was my counsel in light of arbitration decisions which valued pension gains against pay raises (and vice versa), as well as the realities of then-recent collective bargaining agreements.
The need for those intergenerational conversations has not lessened but, rather, increased exponentially, today when many public employees are, at best, seeing their wages decline or, at worst, witnessing the loss of those wages in the most extreme of cases: layoff. It is to be expected that our enemies will seek to turn active employees against retirees by blaming the wage cuts and the layoffs on pension costs, in the age-old, divide-and-conquer strategy. Again, we must not allow that to happen.
But solidarity is a two-way street: just as retirees are not the villains and should not be blamed for the present fiscal challenges, so too should active employees not be made to shoulder alone a disproportionate burden of pension costs for benefits that may prove illusory to them if their wages continue to decline. To put it in the blunt but terribly accurate words of a former police union president who rightly observed many years ago, “Ninety percent of “s***” is still “s***.”
Current retirees, veteran officers, junior officers, rookies – in short, all of us together – must be part of a larger conversation as to how we help fashion a solution to our current challenge. As the old adage goes, whatever it is that unites us is far stronger than that which divides us.
“Roll the Union On . . .”
