The following statement was issued today by the California Federation of
Teachers on the pension reform legislation:
We are disappointed that some elements of the pension reform plan currently
before the Legislature scapegoat public employees who have spent years
educating our children, cleaning our schools, providing services for the needy
and ensuring public safety. Public employee pensions are not the main cause, or
even a major cause, of the State’s on-going budget problems, and portrayals as
such are misleading.
Our state budget woes are overwhelmingly the result of inadequate taxes on the
wealthy and corporations, and the impact of the recession on state revenues.
Blaming hardworking public employees for the Wall Street-driven financial
crisis that led to pension fund shortfalls is not acceptable.
CFT has always supported correction of abuses of the system such as “spiking,”
which in any case was almost exclusively the province of highly paid managers
and administrators. The vast majority of public employees earn modest salaries,
already contribute to their retirement fund, and retire on very modest
compensation.
Due to the decisions of corporate shareholders to increase their profits by
jettisoning reasonable pension programs for their workers, public employees are
put in the position of seeming to have something “special” with a modest
pension, which after all represents deferred salary. We hope the lesson that
emerges from this pension reform episode is that all workers, whether public or
private sector, deserve to enjoy decent lives after they finish their careers.
The CFT represents 120,000 education professionals working at every level of
the education system from ECE to the University. The AFT has more than 3,000
local affiliates nationwide, 43 state affiliates, and more than 1.4 million members.