Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

One of the conservative causes du jour is the parlous state of public employee pensions these days. And there’s no question that this really is a problem. Thanks to years of overoptimistic economic projections and the habit of politicians to prefer future cost increases to current cost increases, public pension funds are pretty seriously underfunded right now. That means taxpayers are going to have to come up with many billions of additional dollars to fund pensions at the levels that have been promised to public workers.

Now, there are a few things to say about this. First, the really sky high pensions you hear horror stories about tend to be limited to public safety workers: police, fire, sheriff’s deputies, etc. (Here in California, the really egregious salary/pension issue is with state prison guards, for reasons I won’t bore you with, but for the most part we’re talking about police and fire workers.) The reason this matters isn’t that money spent on public safety “doesn’t count,” but that most people — including most conservatives — are OK with paying generously in order to maintain high public safety standards. So it’s worth keeping in mind that this is largely what we’re talking about.

Other public workers often get good but not great pensions. But even at that, they mostly get these pensions in lieu of Social Security, and they get them to make up for generally lower pay than in the private sector. There’s some question about whether public workers continue to be paid less than comparable private sector workers, but in the past, when these pension funds were set up, there’s not much question that they were.

Beyond that, though, Jon Cohn raises a key point about the role of public sector unions in bargaining for decent pensions for its workers:

To what extent is the problem that the retirement benefits for unionized public sector workers have become too generous? And to what extent is the problem that retirement benefits for everybody else have become too stingy?

I would suggest it’s more the latter than the former. The promise of stable retirement — one not overly dependent on the ups and downs of the stock market — used to be part of the social contract. If you got an education and worked a steady job, then you got to live out the rest of your life comfortably. You might not be rich, but you wouldn’t be poor, either.

Unions, whatever their flaws, have delivered on that for their members. (In theory, retirement was supposed to rest on a “three-legged stool” of Social Security, pensions, and private benefits.) But unions have not been able to secure similar benefits for everybody else. That’s why the gap exists, although perhaps not for long.

I should confess here that I’m not a big fan of public employee unions. On my own personal scale of sympathy, I strongly support private sector service unions, I moderately support private sector industrial unions, and I only barely support public sector unions. So no one should expect me to go to the mattresses for public sector benefits. Still, Jon is right: one of the favorite tactics of conservatives is to set the middle class at war with itself. It’s sort of the mirror image of corporate compensation committees, which keep CEO pay forever rising because no one wants their CEO to be paid less than average. With middle-income workers, by contrast, the CEO class exploits jealousy toward better compensated unionized workers in order to ratchet things down. The grocery clerks don’t want to accept an insurance copay? Well, I have an insurance copay, so why shouldn’t they? The truckers don’t want to switch their pensions to a 401(k)? Well, I have a 401(k), so why shouldn’t they? Etc., etc., ever more disheartening etc.

This is a tactic that works pretty well. As union density has shriveled in the private sector, workers don’t really aspire anymore to getting a “good union job,” as they often did in the past. It’s not even on their radar. Instead, they see a small and privileged group of workers who are better off than them even though they don’t work any harder, and instead of wondering why their own pay and benefits are so low, they simply become resentful of this coddled class.

Private sector union density has gotten so low that it’s not clear how much they can do about this attitude — and the odds of increasing union density more than a point or two seem cosmically slim. So now it’s going to be a war of taxpayers against unionized public employees. It won’t be hard, especially in lousy economic times, to convince envious clerks and factory workers that these guys need to be brought down a peg or two. It’s just human nature. But wouldn’t it be better if all these envious clerks and factory workers were instead asking why their pay and benefits haven’t kept up with overall economic growth — which, after all, is all that public sector workers have accomplished? I don’t know what the future of unions is in America, but for now they’re really the only ones who are asking that question and putting some muscle behind it. Until someone else starts doing a better job of it, we still need them.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate