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The current attacks on retirement security, including Santa Clara County Assessor Larry Stone's Feb. 27 op-ed on public employee pensions ("Reform California pensions, or taxpayers will revolt -- again"), miss this big picture and pick the wrong targets.
For instance, it has become common practice for high-level managers to amass six-figure annual pension payouts with one hand, while pointing fingers at rank and file workers with the other. As a former Santa Clara County worker, and as a union leader who has bargained contracts for thousands of employees, I can assure you that public workers are not retiring in luxury. The average public sector employee, in fact, will receive $25,000 a year in retirement, and the majority of public sector workers will retire without Social Security or retirement health care benefits.
But if Mr. Stone and others are successful in rewriting the rules, it will be line workers who will pay the price for the excesses of others.
A smarter approach is to take a hard look at where the abuses are taking place and make real corrections there. That's why the Service Employees International Union supports reforms to curb "spiking," the exploitation of vacation time and other loopholes to dramatically increase a retiree's pension, and "double-dipping," the practice of retiring, collecting a pension, then getting rehired the next day as an independent contractor. These practices damage the integrity of the system we count on for security in our retirement, and we need to stop them.
If Mr. Stone is serious about curbing pension excess, he should support these important reforms -- beginning in his own backyard. Two assessor's office employees are simultaneously receiving CalPERS retirement checks and taxpayer-funded salary -- unfortunately a common practice for upper management in the county.
Stone predicts a ballot-box revolution against retirement security for public employees, and yet, ironically, a ballot measure to cut public pensions was abandoned recently by its authors. The effort floundered not for lack of people who want to target pensions, but because potential donors looked at the data and saw that the public strongly supports retirement security and opposes cutting the modest pensions of nurses, social workers and park workers and forcing them to retire in poverty.
The public understands that pensions are a crucial part of our social fabric. State and local pensions do more than provide a critical source of reliable income for 7.3 million retired Americans. They also support 2.5 million American jobs, generate $358 billion in economic activity and result in $57 billion in federal, state and local tax revenue.
Whether in the private or public sectors, everyone who works hard and plays by the rules deserves security in retirement -- and this recession has taught us that 401(k)s won't cut it. The best, most affordable and most secure method of providing a steady income retirement is through pensions.
Instead of stoking the politics of resentment based on crumbling retirement security in the private sector, we need to make sure that more Americans are able to retire with the dignity and security that a pension provides.
KRISTY SERMERSHEIM is chief elected officer of the Service Employees" International Union Local 521, representing more than 52,000 employees in the public sector. She wrote this article for this newspaper.
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Kristy Sermersheim, SEIU 521 CEO on 3/9/2010 at 4:39:00 PM