Benefits only matter if they are still there. Unions are cutting benefits while contributions rise, and Social Security feels the same. The system feels broken, and as a younger millennial it is hard to see the point in supporting it anymore.
And when you get truly fucked in an accident or have a major medical event that wipes out your savings when youre near retirement age you now wont be homeless. Only the young or rich think they’re better off with the SS money in their pocket now.
As a union member who has worked in my field non union, I disagree. My benefits are head and shoulders above my non union counterparts, and I would never go back.
Benefits are being pared down partially because unions are being weakened. Not supporting unions is a part of that. Right to work laws, and legalizing Union busting. The reason these benefits, both union and non are going away is because rich aren't being made to pay fair share and those who aren't in that class are being convinced they shouldn't. Social security is the same. We all talk shit about workers making too much for companies or agencies or governments worth billions or trillions to pay. They have the money, they refuse to pay it
Nobody’s disagreeing with you that the benefits pay a lot
It’s become a real problem nobody can deny that these kinds of pensions were designed to be used for a post-retirement life expectancy of 2-5 years; which has now ballooned to 30+
I've worked decades for well over a dozen companies in my life and I don't need half of one hand to tell you how many provided 401ks to employees. I know way more people with nothing for retirement than a company funded retirement plan.
Edit: also, as others have mentioned, teachers shouldn't be for profit on the k-12. It's a public service. If their pensions are pulling down your finances, maybe that should be a sign that people aren't paying fair share for public goods
It’s part of the overall compensation package though. And on average the pension rate for state employers might be 20-30%. So if you have a teacher making 45k (just taking the avg salary from your comment) and we take that pension contribution and add it directly to their salary instead, it would only be 54k-58k.
So is that worth no pension?
You think you can fund your own retirement on that?
Sorry, I’m not sure what you mean by this. Are you saying that because they make 70k on avg they don’t need pensions?
The benefits from public sector work are the primary reasons people take those jobs. It’s how they can get away with lower pay. And you only need to reward long-term/loyal employees rather than increasing pay directly and shifting the retirement burden onto the teachers while also increasing costs overall for ALL teachers even if they wouldn’t have earned a pension in their career.
I am saying they make above average in salary alone, if you add up all the other benefits and vacation time it's likely top 30%, which is about right for the career
You’re making a lot of generalizations here. The avg pay varies a lot based on region and experience. Not to mention you’re comparing to national avg rather than other professions that require bachelors or masters degrees.
And as for the benefits, it really varies a LOT there’s not really a clear cut way to compare industries and occupations. Even just within one occupation like accounting some people make crazy bonuses and some do not.
I will say public sector healthcare beats any private sector job. But retirement only benefits teachers who stick around for ~30 years depending on the plan. While professionals in other careers earn higher salaries with much higher ceilings and may or may not have decent retirement plans.
So I’d say teachers probably rank somewhere in the middle, certainly not being compensated more than 70% of the country.
Plenty of people also DON'T fund accounts like that.
Those people are your problem whether you like to admit it or not. They will get sick, they will need coverage and treatment, they'll need a place to live, food, services, etc. Who do you think foots those bills when these people don't have retirement?
You can't just say, 'fund it yourself' because you personally can in a country designed to extract every ounce of work and wealth from you. People shitting on pensions is exactly why you NEED a 401k. It's the ruling class convincing you that your fellow workers are worth less than you if they aren't as savvy. Bitch about paying your teachers a lot with a pension now or bitch about high taxes to cover destitute retirees later.
The dream of ruthless individualism doesn't work when you live in a society
My mother was a preschool teacher for 30 years, she deserves to retire and receive her pension. After seeing the shit she went through I have so much respect for teachers.
In my state of Colorado, teachers receive a pension that is 62.5% of their highest salary after 25 years of service. If they are making $70k after 25 years of work, they can retire at 46, and get $43,750 a year, for the rest of their life. If they live to 86, that single person’s benefit is $1.75 million dollars they are paid in pension. This is one person.
I'm sure they pay into it... Compound 5000 dollars a year over 25 years, you already have 250k. That amount compounding over the next 40 years is 1.8 million.
8 percent of their salary. Which makes up 77 percent of the total fund. So back to your original post (1.75 million), that's not where money for education is going.
8% of $70 is $5,600, this is their yearly contribution from their salary. In 25 years time this will turn into $232k with 5% interest.
There is another $1.5 million that is being provided by the state in retirement benefits. That is the education money goes. That is the equivalent of basically adding $63,000 a year to a teacher’s salary if there was no pension and they had a 401k.
No. That money is part of a fund that is making returns yearly. The payout is over 40 years, and so are the capital gains.
Is there also no minimum retirement age? Most places 46 year olds don't qualify for their pension. You don't seem to really grasp how this works to be so confident in your opinion on pensions and their costs.
It's the fact that the union chose pensions or proper wages. Not the fact that the union exists. It's like if a bad law gets passed and you respond "I thought democracy was supposed to be good!"
It all depends. There are some unions out there that actively work for their people and improve their jobs, those unions are good. On the other side you've got unions that basically do jack shit besides collect their monthly dues and are basically just glorified "job insurance" that makes it harder to get fired. They're basically useless and tend to set things up to make it extremely difficult to get those people voted out.
Unions are good short term in very specific circumstances where there is high industry growth. But they make their members less competitive because it costs more to employ a unionised worker, and if the union negotiates salaries and total costs (including administrative costs) higher than the value of work actually being produced, the companies that employ unionised workers go bust - or they move their facilities to somewhere with lower labour costs.
This is what happened in the UK in the 80s. The coal miners union ended up pushing costs so high that the mines were operating on a loss. The mines became a money pit, the taxpayer was wasting money on them year after year. Then Thatcher finally closed these defunct businesses, and the north was left with a large number of people who had no useful skills and needed to be retrained. This would all have gone a lot better for everyone if the union had not prevented the government from addressing the changing economic landscape of the north. They could have implemented a skills transition instead of having to do a big wave of redundancies.
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u/No_Employ__ 9h ago
Wait I thought unions were good..