Pensions Aren’t the Problem for State Budgets
This is a crosspost by AFSCME Secretary-Treasurer Lee Saunders from Huffington Post.
Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, the Pravda of the 1 percent, is at it again, continuing its push to gut the retirement security of millions of middle class workers across the country while enriching the Wall Street moneymen who just three years ago took our economy over the cliff.
Virtually everyone agrees that our nation faces a retirement security crisis, but the Journal last week published a shameful op-ed calling for the elimination of pensions for nurses, firefighters, corrections officers and others who still have them. Having punched private-sector workers retirement in the gut, these folks won’t be happy until the whole concept of a secure retirement for working Americans is a thing of the past.
The typical AFSCME member — men and women who plow our streets, care for the sick, protect our children, clean our buildings and keep our communities safe — receives a pension of approximately $19,000 a year after a career of public service. The employees have earned and paid for these pensions. Employee contribution rates commonly amount to 3 percent to 10 percent of their paychecks. These contributions, combined with investment earnings, usually account for 75 percent or more of all pension benefit funding. Read the rest of this entry »
Worker Deaths Belie Politicians’ Portrayal of Public Employees
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Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R), New Jersey Chris Christie (R) and politicians around the nation are running campaigns to demonize public employees and lay the blame for state budget problems at their feet.
They conveniently ignore the dedicated and many times dangerous work public employees do every day–like AFSCME Local 379 member Billy Rhynalds and Teamsters (IBT) Local 117 member Jayme Biendl, both of whom were killed recently on the job.
Rhynalds was setting up traffic cones Feb. 2 after heavy rains struck western Washington, flooding roads and knocking down power lines. When a cottonwood tree fell on the highway, it hit and killed Rhynalds.
Biendl, a corrections officer at the Monroe (Wash.) Correctional Complex, was murdered Jan. 29 as she worked alone in the prison chapel.
AFSCME Blocks Prison Privatizing Profiteers
In Minnesota, AFSCME and its correction officer members won a major victory in the fight against privatizing the state’s prisons when the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) announced it is shutting down its 1,600-bed Prairie Correctional Facility in Appleton next month.
Thanks to lobbying and pressure from AFSCME members, the state is placing more offenders in state-run facilities. The prison population at Prairie was down to just 250 at the end of 2009. Those inmates are being transferred to state facilities.
Eliot Seide, AFSCME Council 5 executive director, says the union has been
pushing government to take responsibility for corrections, not pass the buck to private corporations that profit from prisons.
