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Which is exactly what I meant by legal confidentiality. It isn't "common", it's required by law.
However, talk about benefits and pensions and such is not legally confidential. There's nothing secret about what these policies are, and many school systems and states post them right on the internet.
I am not a teacher, but I worked for a public transportation agency all my life, and it's simply a fact that while a lot of people like to moan and complain about such entities, they don't really bother to learn how they work and have a lot of fairly ignorant notions about them.
An example that you may be familiar with already, or can easily find out about.
Early 2000’s, a well known band teacher at Lewis Palmer high school suddenly is no longer the band teacher, but instead he moved into a much higher paid administrator position at the school. He stays three or four more years and then retires. The result? Depending on the exact rules in place at the time, he has a pension that is based in whole or in part on an administrator salary level rather than a band director salary level.
Are you unaware of this type of thing happening?
If the taxpayers approve of a salary and retirement package for music teacher, but end up paying retirement for a higher paid administrator, there’s a problem. Is it allowed for under the contract? Most assuredly. But it is certainly not what the taxpayers believed they were signing up for.
Police officers in many departments are able to do this. Just before retirement, they are making their normal salary of $80,000. But then by working significant overtime, and cashing in vacation and sick time, suddenly they have qualifying compensation of $150,000, and a pension based on $150,000 rather than $80,000. Do you believe that the taxpayers knew they were signing up for this?
This happens all the time. The transportation agency I worked for had its own police force, and they often padded their pensions in this way at the end of their career.
Unfortunately, police have the ability to find out things about people, and the people in positions to sign their contracts often have secrets they don't want made public, so the practice will go on.
No, it isn't a cop out. Except when the names of students or, sometimes, the names of adults working for the school district are being discussed (personnel decisions), school board meetings are open to the public, and school board members can be questioned about hiring policies and benefits.
In your many posts, I have noted your tendency to believe that everyone has to respond to your posts in the way you want them to respond. Well, sorry Charlie, I'm going to respond in the way that reflects my POV.
What you don't seem to understand is that the issue you're describing isn't just the gods of education or police standing on high and saying, "Oh let's toss out oodles of bennies for all our people". The benefits develop because the government agencies involved are trying to attract candidates to take the jobs that are open and that requires competition with other agencies hiring from the same pool of candidates. I have seen the flight of good teachers from Prince Georges County in Maryland to Montgomery County in Maryland and Northern Virginia school systems. And it was salary, benefits, and retirement benefits (along with teaching conditions) that brought along the flight. Especially with most teachers who are raising a family, they have to look at where will I be paid the most and receive the most positive benefits.
I don't care what profession it is, private or public, when a company or government entity offers benefits in a contract, those benefits need to be paid off. There's no justification for CHEATING and suddenly changing the rules in the middle of the game. If you want to change the rules, you do so for future employees, not the people you've already contracted with.
Not to mention good teachers leaving the toxic dysfunction that is Prince George's County Public Schools to systems that pay less to get away from the aforementioned toxic dysfunction.
The following book is excellent reading to understand how we got here together with the implication going forward for both public sector and private sector pensions. Note the book is 10 years old and was published just before the Great Recession. Much of the book is historical -- the nature of public sector pensions in the late 1800s for NYC subway workers going forward into bargains made by FDR with labor unions all the way to the present time (well, mid-2000s.)
During the 1950s and early 1960s, several major industrial corporations bet the farm by making pacts with their primary labor unions. Studebaker was one such company. These corporations didn't have the financial strength to innovate & compete while simultaneously paying the ever-higher demands of their primary labor unions. In Studebaker's case, its primary union the UAW couldn't just let its union members there earn far less than UAW workers at the more financially sound GM, Ford, Chrysler & AMC (AMC was the next weakest, of course).
So, in Studebaker's case, the UAW executives and the corporation's executives struck a bargain. They would leave current wages low in exchange for a generous increase in future pension benefits. This way, the UAW could sell the contract to its rank-and-file who were jealous of the paychecks of their brethren at the other auto companies.
Executives at Studebaker & the UAW know that this was a "Hail Mary."
They knew if the UAW forced the higher wages found at the other car companies that Studebaker would go out of business. Only by giving the corporation another shot at a product cycle would union workers and the company have a shot at survival. Hence the bargain.
We all know what happened next. The products didn't succeed, and the company failed. Its pension plan was woefully underfunded. Pensioners suffered. Real people were hurt badly - retirees, almost-retirees, rank-and-file workers who were decades from retirement, shareholders including elderly widows, etc. It wasn't just Studebaker -- many other industrial corporations suffered the same fate, and their union workers suffered.
Congress acted. The result was the Employee Retirement & Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA). In very simple terms, the didn't require employers to offer a pension. But, if a pension were offered, it required a bunch of things including actuarially sound accounting, vesting schedules, public disclosure of financial information, fiduciary responsibility, etc. The objective was that rank and file workers would have some assurance that the pension would be there for them decades down the line.
Congress' original intent was to make those same provisions apply to public sector pensions at the state & local level. After all, who could argue with sound accounting practices to ensure the public sector pension funds won't go belly up in the future?
It turns out the public sector union executives lobbied hard against ERISA being applied to the public sector.
Why? Well, they learned from the UAW playbook. In the subsequent decades, they gave public sector elected officials a choice: increased compensation now or goose the pensions for later.
Politicians, being politicians, increasingly chose the latter. They opted for labor peace today (and campaign contributions today) in exchange for someone else paying the bill of outsized pensions decades hence in far-off 2018. After all, the elected representatives themselves would be retired by then and it would be someone else's problem.
I feel the taxpayers should pay their taxes in their entirety, not being allowed to pick and choose which ones to pay for or not.
HOWEVER, I also believe public sector employee benefits should be adjusted to match the private marketplace. If 90% of the private sector employees do not earn a pension, then the public sector should be adjusted accordingly. Maybe jettison that particular benefit for new hires.
I feel the taxpayers should pay their taxes in their entirety, not being allowed to pick and choose which ones to pay for or not.
HOWEVER, I also believe public sector employee benefits should be adjusted to match the private marketplace. If 90% of the private sector employees do not earn a pension, then the public sector should be adjusted accordingly. Maybe jettison that particular benefit for new hires.
More realistically, the benefits for new hires have been changed. In many cases, they must work longer to collect full benefits and they may pay in more than past members did.
I feel the taxpayers should pay their taxes in their entirety, not being allowed to pick and choose which ones to pay for or not.
HOWEVER, I also believe public sector employee benefits should be adjusted to match the private marketplace. If 90% of the private sector employees do not earn a pension, then the public sector should be adjusted accordingly. Maybe jettison that particular benefit for new hires.
I think I need to say again what some of you are missing.
To be honest, some of what I am hearing in this thread sounds like jealousy, rather than what policy should be.
The harder time a school system (for example, although it could be other government agencies) have hiring qualified people, the more they need to make benefits that are attractive. The best example I've seen of this is in the school systems surrounding Washington, D.C. Poorest benefits -- Prince George's County, Maryland. Best benefits -- Fairfax County Public Schools, Virginia and Montgomery County, Maryland. Lowest test scores PG County. Best test scores, FFX and Montgomery. There's a correlation.
This is a big pet peeve of mine. IMO, there should be no private or public pensions. These are Ponzi schemes. Worse is when they are allowed to be raided and underfunded. All investments should be privatized and funded directly by the individual or from a company/government entity directly to individual private accounts as current compensation.
This is a big pet peeve of mine. IMO, there should be no private or public pensions. These are Ponzi schemes. Worse is when they are allowed to be raided and underfunded. All investments should be privatized and funded directly by the individual or from a company/government entity directly to individual private accounts as current compensation.
And you feel so strongly about it, I'm sure you will never accept a pension, even if entitled to one!
And you feel so strongly about it, I'm sure you will never accept a pension, even if entitled to one!
You mean that pillaged Ponzi scheme SS that I’m forced at gun point to participate in?
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