On Saturday Kern County workers represented by the Service Employees International Union began voting on whether to authorize a strike.
Read the whole story here: http://www.bakersfield.com/news/local/x1937969450/County-workers-tell-how-the-benefit-cuts-will-hurt
The vote is part of a ramp-up to an expected Kern County Board of Supervisors decision to impose a contract on county employees represented by the union that would force about 2,000 SEIU members to begin paying 20 percent of their health care and more than 3,100 of them to begin paying one-third of their contribution to retirement, a ratio that would increase to 100 percent over the next three years.
Kern’s dispute is an echo of similar fights happening across the country as local and state governments look to workers to offset the cost of retirement programs that are desperately short on cash and budgets that are battered by the downturn in the economy.
It truly is sad but years of financial mismanagement by local, state and federal leaders is coming to a head and it looks like the only way out of this mess is by making drastic cuts…
The fight between public sector employees and private sector employees has been going on for a few months now and now what I believe you are going to see is a chasm beginning to develop between new public employees and the old public employees who are trying to hold onto benefit packages that are clearly unsustainable.
While I feel compassion for anyone going through a layoff or facing a pay cut I cannot understand for the life of me why someone (public employees) feels like they should receive their full retirement package just because “someone” (a corrupt politician) made them a promise that they knew full well they would be unable to keep. Seriously just look at the numbers… there’s a lot more money going out then coming in!
The one thing I consistently hear from public employees is that “we all made choices” and that they took less pay to work for the gubment.
Yes, Mr Public Employee we all made choices and unfortunately you made a choice to work for a corrupt government that cooked the books and will continue to cook the books. You made a decision to be employed by a government that makes Enron accounting seem legit!
These corrupt politicians will only make cuts that are absolutely necessary and they will get worse and worse every year until one day their city is bankrupt and they have to stop sending out pension checks all together.
Don’t think it’s possible?
Just look what happened in Prichard, Alabama:
Then Prichard did something that pension experts say they have never seen before: it stopped sending monthly pension checks to its 150 retired workers, breaking a state law requiring it to pay its promised retirement benefits in full.
You can check out the whole story here: New York Times.
According to the NY Times, Prichard is the future…
Most cities across the US are facing similar situations it’s just a matter of time before all cites go bankrupt and then the real pay cuts, I’m afraid, will really hit the public employees.
Personally I’m not here to bash public employees. All I’m saying is don’t leave your retirement in the hands of people you know to be corrupt! That includes both Wall Street and the government!
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