<p>Public sector pensions are a complicated topic and quite frankly public sector employees, including teachers, have become the new “welfare Queens” i.e scapegoat for every ill out there. In the early 1980’s we had the myth of welfare queens driving cadillacs to pick up their welfare checks and that is why taxes were so high and so forth (which like with public sector employees, the reality of welfare and its issues went beyond the sound bite). </p>
<p>The big problem with public sector pensions is that they are severely underfunded, in part because states over the past several decades have deferred payments to them to balance their budgets, and some state programs have gotten killed investing funds targeted for pensions (Calpers, the california state pension fund, was at one time one of the largest institutional investors in the country), so what has happened in many cases is they have huge pension liabilities because it has come time to pay the piper and the money isn’t there. There are problems with public pension plans, in some of them the rate of contribution of those in them has remained very small with the government picking up much of the cost; in others, because of rules of how pensions are estimated (in NY and NJ, for many government jobs, it is 1/2 your final years compensation, so many workers with the support of their supervisors do a lot of OT their last year, can double their salary, and then end up with a full pension). In NJ you can also have multiple jobs, each with a pension (these are generally political jobs, not civil service)…and so forth.</p>
<p>There are issues that need to be addressed with public service jobs, for example with medical care government jobs are pretty much the only ones that still pay for retiree health benefits, the private sector dropped those years ago, likewise private sector firms almost universally have switched to 401k style retirement plans, that make the worker save for their retirement and the employer matches it at various levels, but also gives them the ability in lean years not to contribute. More importantly, many public service jobs allow you to retire in 20 years or have retirement earlier then the 65 in public sector jobs, so they tend to have higher ratio of retirees at any given time then the private sector (some of these make sense, cops and fireman, for example, tend to take their toll on the person, but clerical and office jobs often have the same earlier retirement options). </p>
<p>Part of this quite frankly is that private sector employees have taken a beating, and in some places (NJ is one of them), whereas it used to be assumed public sector employees took less in salary but did the job because of better benefits compared to the private sector, because the public employees actually got raises, the pay for public employees is no longer on a comparable basis that much less then private sector, who also have gotten killed, besides no raises, with increased health care and other costs taken out of their pay. So people are ****ed at their own situation, and angry that in things like health care and other benefits, like a fixed pension, public sector employees do better then many in the private…and it is very easy to bash public sector employees because so much propaganda has been put out there about them, especially since they are unionized and there has been a campaign for 30 years to try and shift the blame for company failures, outsourcing and such on unions (disclosure, I am not a member of a union nor am I a public employee), plus we all have tales of dealing with incompetent, arrogant public employees whose behavior wouldn’t be tolerated in most jobs, and so forth, and it is easy to blame them. Our dear governor here in NJ is like that, to deflect from the realities, that past governments, republican and democratic, have played games to balance the budget, he has found a scapegoat that everything is greedy teachers and public employees, and is using that to deflect anger when people find out what his gashes to state spending are going to do to their lives. </p>
<p>Most teacher layoffs in this area are by seniority, there is a major battle brewing in NYC to try and get rid of that and make it that the first to be let go are poorly rated teachers, including teachers in so called ‘rubber rooms’ who no principal wants, teachers who have gotten in trouble and so forth but can’t be fired, then it would be by seniority, but it is a massive battle. It often means a 15 year timeserver who hasn’t shown much enthusiasm or great teaching skills will keep their job while a promising teacher who has shown results will be let go. Part of the problem is the fear, not without cause, that they will let go of experienced,good teachers simply to cut costs as the private sector often does and replace them with younger teachers who are cheaper no matter how good or bad they are, which is where education can suffer.</p>
<p>Quite honestly, going into teaching in most places is probably like going into music as a career, you should go into it because you love to teach and want to, not because you think it is a steady job or a good port in an economic storm, because one thing that has been demonstrated over the years, when troubled times happen teachers are not particularly better off, and though there are benefits to being a teacher, the summer off and so forth, the pay generally is a lot less then a white collar job with similar qualifications.</p>
Doesn’t make for a very pleasant working environment I’m sure.</p>
