EARTH SHATTERING NEWS ALERT: Teachers' Union Busting in Philly

[haele]

51. Will it increase the current retiree's pensions to pay for the costs that they now have to pay?

RANT

This is a major problem to a teacher who retired back when they didn't also get to pay into social security, and still a significant problem for teachers whose pensions are just about in line with social security.
My father was a 30 year retired teacher (because he couldn't get a tenured position until he was in his late 30's) who could have opted for the "free" medical, dental, vision, and long-term care retirement package his district offered back in the 1980's (in lieu of paying into SS and FICA), his pension would only have been $2000 a month.
Because he didn't, because he had other options like an equally hard-working spouse, his pension ended up being $2500 a month.
He had enough social security and FICA with the other non-teaching jobs he had worked back before he was tenured to make ends meet to qualify for SS and Medicare. But he was in a rather unusual position compared to most of his fellow teachers - especially many of his old-school male colleagues who had a stay-at-home spouse because the $25K - $35K a year job in the late1980's/early 1990's was enough to keep a house and raise a family fairly comfortably.

Most retirees who depend on a pension expect that the bargain they had with the school district be kept, especially if the compensations, the amount of money the district was supposed to have put aside for the medical costs, etc had been agreed to. For the most part, these teachers aren't living high off the hog in retirement, going on international travel for a month every year, with winter homes in the Bahamas and a summer vacation timeshare in Wyoming to bring the grand-kids to.

Most of them are lucky if they have the house paid off - and that and a couple IRAs or T-bonds are the most valuable investments they will hopefully be able to leave to their heirs.

It's always "interesting" to see how these official and oh-so-responsible fiscal organizations can get away with not providing a just compensation to the employee while they are working in the name of providing a pension and benefits for after retirement, and then deciding not to pay that employee what was promised when it comes time to do so. "Oh, they're nothing but a burden...there's no value to paying them anything now, they aren't doing anything for us...just sucking up taxpayer money".

Well, assholes, if you paid them full freight up front in lieu of the pension promise, you'd have had to pay them the burdened wage out of pocket at that time instead of passing it on as a book-keeping figure to put in the line at the end of the year after you sucked the interest off the holding period of the allocated funding.

That means in 1980, instead of paying all those teachers a beginning salary of $12 - $15K a year, you should have been paying them $17 - $20K a year - and paying into that SS and FICA every month. And then, only then, you can now complain about "poor lifestyle choices", as if being anything but an investment manager or venture capitalist was a bad lifestyle choice.
But no, if you paid your teachers and other labor what they were actually worth at the time without cheating on the pension and health benefits, you couldn't play bookkeeping games with taxpayer funds and pretend you had a good enough budget you could give board members, advisers, and administrators obscenely high wages, could you?

Hypocritical sack of shit bean counters.

RANT/

Haele