Pension hearing draws overflow union/retiree crowd as lawmakers consider ‘compromises’ to cut public worker pension and medical benefits -- but not increase funding
Pension “reform” proposals that could dramatically reduce future benefits for anyone with a State of Illinois pension drew a crowd opposing the cuts. Some 200 current and retired teachers and other state employees converged on the State of Illinois’s Bilandic Building in downtown Chicago on the afternoon of Thursday, June 27, 2013. There, a “Committee of Ten” state senators and representatives held a public meeting as part of a political “negotiation” to see if the Illinois General Assembly could produce legislation to solve a claimed deficit in pension funding.
AFSCME lobbyist Adienne Alexander (at right) compares various bills pending before the Illinois legislature to “reform” pensions for state employees, in the lobby of the State of Illinois’s Bilandic Building in downtown Chicago on Thursday, June 27, 2013. The union members and retirees were in the lobby because there was not enough space for them in the hearing room upstairs, where lawmakers were discussing the latest pension “crisis.” Substance photo by David R. Stone.The governor and leaders of both chambers of the Illinois General Assembly have been pushing various proposals to reduce retirees’ health benefits and/ or cost-of-living increases. These are being made without any proposals to reduce give-aways to corporations or to increase tax revenues to pay for government services. Some of the speakers at the hearing encouraged the lawmakers to consider a wider range of solutions. No new legislation was expected to come out of this first meeting of the Committee of Ten, and it is uncertain whether any pension legislation will be agreed on in this session of the Illinois Congress.
The legislative bills being discussed in these current negotiations would affect the State Employees Retirement System, the State Universities Retirement System and the Teachers Retirement System.
Chicago Public Schools pensions are in a separate system, the Chicago Teachers Pension Fund (CTPF). While not in as much trouble as the TRS, the CTPF faces funding shortfalls because for two decades Chicago teachers have paid their share, but the Chicago Board of Education has gotten out of paying its share. The projected shortfall could make it hard to meet retirees’ needs in the future.
Since the Illinois General Assembly took away the separate tax line supporting the CTPF in 1993, politicians have manipulated the CTPF payments from the Board. In recent years, the Illinois legislature has given Chicago Board of Education a number of “holidays” from paying its contribution to teachers’ pension. The most recent, which began in 2010, allowed the Chicago Board of Education to skip payments totaling $1.2 billion, total, between 2010 and this year.
As late as June 26, the day before the legislative hearing, the current members of the Chicago Board of Education showed no interest in recovering revenue lost to corporate give-aways, despite please from parents, teachers and other leaders from across the city. Instead, Board members focused on the "pension crisis" as if it were the only problem with the CPS budget were spending too much on teachers in the schools and the increase CPS is required to pay into the CTPF this year.
Protesters at the Committee of Ten’s hearing pointed out that state pension benefits are a contract right guaranteed under the Illinois Constitution. They said that current employees and retirees have always made their contributions to the pension fund, and should not be the ones to pay the cost of the state’s fiscal problems.
Representative Kwame Raoul (a Democrat from the 13th District, on the South Side of Chicago) chaired the “compromise” committee hearing in the Senate & House Committee Room, on the 6th floor of the state-owned building.
As one of the state’s largest room for public hearings in the Chicago area, the June 27 hearing room has the capacity to hold 150 people. The chamber was completely filled. Other members of the overflow crowd watched the hearings on a TV screen just outside of the hearing room, while approximately 50 more citizens were made to wait in the building’s ground floor lobby.
The gathered citizens –- nearly all of them wearing union shirts, and buttons opposing pension cuts –- included members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the Service Employees International Union, the Illinois Federation of Teachers, the University Professionals Union and the Chicago Teachers Union.
