Strangled by Pensions, We Now Work for the Unions

Want to know a word that will haunt us in the next twenty years? Pensions.  Many don’t realize that public sector workers, from teachers, to firefighters to cops, have been promised far more in pensions than the rest of us, and now it’s bankrupting us. Mort Zuckerman wrote a piece in yesterday’s WSJ that pointed out some of these lopsided benefits–that few in the private sector can even dream about.

It’s especially bad in California. Prison guards can make six-figure salaries, and many state workers retire at 55 with pensions that are higher than the base pay they earned most of their working lives.  These public unions’ and leadership all have one thing in common: they vote, they organize, and as a result they have the politicians scrambling to keep supporting their bloated contracts, out of fear they won’t be re-elected.

The California budget is so out of wack, Governor Arnold is proposing severe cuts. But if he tries to get members of the Service Employees International Union to say, make members pay more of their own health insurance, the bill gets stonewalled.  Zuckerman offers one solution: take the contract negotiations out of the hands of legislators and have independent commissions decide on the union’s raises and benefits.