I learned about the pension debacle in Rhode Island from a security guard in a parking garage in upstate New York. We were chatting about retirement when he asked where I originally came from. His next statement caught me off guard as he related the news about attacks on teachers’ pensions.
It took a day to have the news confirmed by reading articles on possible pension cuts in The Journal and from speaking to a representative from the American Federation of Teachers. That Rhode Island was planning to renege on legal promises made to its retirees made sense in the context of articles I had previously read in The New York Times that listed Rhode Island as one of several states with underfunded state pension systems. Earlier in the year, I had read of the attempts to strip benefits of retired police officers and firefighters in Central Falls.
After 30 years working as a teacher in Rhode Island, I hardly think that I, and thousands like me, should be penalized by bad investment decisions of The Employees’ Retirement System of Rhode Island, the notoriously dysfunctional state government, and the disastrous lack of economic planning of the part of both major political parties in Washington, D.C. Also, retired state workers and retired teachers and future retirees ought not to have to pay the price for the ill-advised early retirement disaster of the late 1980s in Rhode Island that caused serious problems in funding future retirement payouts, a situation now worsened by the “Great” Recession.
Times have never been better for wealthy Rhode Islanders and big Rhode Island corporations. But of course, there is no state and national will to tax those at the top of their game, so those in the middle class and working class are being made scapegoats for the national party that has been going on since the Reagan administration. And times have never been better for those mega corporations who ship jobs overseas and make use of offshore tax havens to shirk their tax responsibility.
Rhode Island officials, bent on attacking retired state workers’ and teachers’ benefits, have focused on the 3 percent yearly Cost-of-Living Adjustment (C.O.L.A.). Those officials ought to try to survive in the current economy with the astronomical price rise for items such as food and gasoline. Some of these same officials need to try looking for work after retirement, as the economy has cast off millions of older workers, treating them as disposable.
Nationally, there’s lots of energy being poured into the anti-union movement and the anti-teacher movement. Threats to in-service and retired teachers’ future and present retirement benefits are but one facet of this anti-union and anti-teacher movement that seeks to portray everything public as evil and everything private as good. Teachers across the nation take hits because they are the most visible segment of public sector unions. While the economic race to the bottom proceeds in Rhode Island, state government seeks to hoist its dysfunction onto the backs of those who labored for decades with the promise of pensions and some measure of dignity.
howielisnoff 