Pension issue from other point of view

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Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

I’ve been going through the letters I’ve received over the past couple weeks about the Wisconsin governor’s fight with the unions and our own looming battle here in Springfield over public employee pensions.

People really get worked up about this subject, understandably so, because it hits them directly in the pocketbook and touches directly on some pretty basic stuff about what they believe.

Some people really hate unions. I get that, but I’m not one of them.

I’m a union member, which puts me in the minority because there’s not many of us left in the private sector. I believe in unions. I’ve personally seen the good in what they can do, although I also know they can get off track, and my personal opinion is the public employee unions have gotten off track by forgetting that their real employer is the taxpayers, not the politicians cutting the deals.

I also believe in defined benefit pension plans, the old-fashioned kind that practically nobody in the private sector receives anymore. I’m not interested in taking those away from public employees, only in bringing the benefits under control to the point that taxpayers can afford to pay for them.

As I pointed out in one of the columns, we shouldn’t touch the benefits of current retirees. Also, we shouldn’t take away any pension benefits a current employee has earned up to this point. But from this point forward, there needs to be new, more sensible benefit levels.

Invariably when I write about this subject, public employees will complain that I failed to mention certain points that they believe make their position more easily understood. So let’s lay them out.

1. Most public employees in Illinois don’t receive Social Security. This is true, although it’s also true they don’t have to pay into Social Security.

2. Unlike private sector workers, public employees are required to contribute a portion of their pay toward their own pensions. Also true, though again keep in mind they aren’t paying into Social Security. They would point out their contribution rate is higher than for Social Security.

3. The pension funding problem was caused by the failure of elected officials at state and local levels to make the necessary payments to cover the public’s portion of the costs, not by any malfeasance from the public employees or their unions. That’s also true, but the finger pointing doesn’t solve anything. Governments chose to spend their money elsewhere, arguably because they couldn’t afford the pension promises that were made. You can’t get that money back. The question is what to do going forward.

4. The worst pensions from a taxpayer’s point of view are those received by our state legislators and other elected officials. Yes, their benefit levels are the most generous, a fact we’ve been writing about at the Sun-Times for 20 years at least, so it really irritates me when somebody acts like we’re covering it up. The fact remains, however, that there are relatively few people covered by those pension provisions so that is a minor factor in the overall problem.

5. City, county and state workers are not all treated equally by their various retirement plans, so generalizing about them based on our knowledge of one group does not always hold true. Retirement age, maximum benefit levels and health insurance costs can vary greatly, depending on the retirement system. And it’s true that we in the news media tend to focus on the most egregious examples of those who have gamed the system.

Having said all that, the fact remains that to avoid a situation like they have in Wisconsin or Indiana, public employee unions in Illinois are going to have to come forward and look for ways to solve the pension funding problem in a way that eases the burden on the taxpayers.

Oh, yes. And that’s another thing the public employees want everyone to remember: They’re taxpayers, too.

That should make it that much easier for them to understand how this problem looks from the private sector side.