Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Do or die time for pensions

The legislature may be about the ram a pension bill through.  Here's a link to the latest statement by the IEA president, Cindy Klickna. And here's a link to a handy form that will allow you to send off a quick email to the governor and your legislators. The IEA provides a form letter, but you can edit or delete it and write your own.

This development is so depressing that I've tried to ignore it. But if all us take a few minutes to send off a quick email, that may make a bit of a difference. I use the union links because they are handy, and the unions ought to have some power with our Democratic state government, but this is, I suspect, an issue that unifies the vast majority of faculty, union or no. As I've blogged before, our pensions are already far less than those at peer institutions. These reforms threaten to reduce them to Walmart levels--no better than Social Security (and in fact cheaper for the state, which doesn't even match the payments it would need to make were we in the Social Security system).

4 comments:

  1. I've just done so, Dave. Perhaps our many anons. should do the same?

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  2. One reason I turned down an endowed chair at Wichita State last year was because I had a good pension in Illinois. My mistake. Whatever happened to rule of law? The gall of Madigan to say "politicians" in the past didn't do the right thing. He ought to resign in disgrace. But this is Illinois - whorehouses have higher ethical standards, and they don't have to fill out annual ethics forms!

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  3. It is amazing that in this current historical era, I find myself so much in agreement with "Mr. Bean." This is a situation in which we are all going to get done in no matter what particular ideas we may have.

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  4. Tony Williams and Jonathan Bean in agreement! It is almost enough to make me reconsider my decision to stop blogging.

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