Pension questions
My neighbor is a longtime labor organizer and I trust her sense of things. Her husband is a teacher and unionist also. A few weeks ago we were talking about the state of things in the labor movement, specifically leftwing caucuses organizing to take over big teacher unions. She said something that stuck with me, which I thought I'd write out in honor of Labor Day.
The older teachers in these huge unions, she said, always vote in elections and they tend to vote with the older leaders because they've known them for a long time. But there's something possibly more powerful than their sense of familiarity with existing leadership: their pensions.
If you spend your career in a public service profession, or any profession with a pension, you start to really appreciate your pension. As a fixed benefit, you'll take home whatever salary you finish your career at until you die. Retirement can't come soon enough. And if anyone or anything or any group messes with your pension, you pay attention because that's your livelihood as you age and need more medical care and can't work to earn.
So my neighbor wagered that if the relatively younger leftwing caucuses in the union could come to understand the ins and outs of their unions' pension policies, and then propose ways to improve those policies or at least show that existing leadership isn't doing as much as they could for pensions, then that might sway the older voters in an election.
I can't get this wager out of my head. It feels right to me. And it also piqued my interest because I don't know as much as I'd like about pensions, those blue whales of public finance, huge pools of capital that sit steady, hoping to make a return as their managers invest and beneficiaries get their mandated payouts.
Is my neighbor right? What would we have to know about pensions to craft a campaign around them? How do teacher pensions interface with local, state, and federal policies? How do they interface with markets of all sorts? Pensions are huge investors, holding a unique sway while still accountable to a public mission. How do teacher pensions differ state to state? How are they implicated in the climate crisis?
I've written a little about pensions here and there, namely about the French crisis' similarity to teacher pensions in the US today and Mike Glass and Sean Vanatta's great work on the history of pension investments in New York and how it might lend itself to creative policy proposals in Pennsylvania.
So I'm thinking its time to go deeper. These pensions have big implications for district budgets, coming to bear both on operating and capital expenditures. I'd like to do a mini-series on teacher pensions, following my nose to get a better sense of these beasts. Here's some stuff I'm thinking of looking at (and if you have any recommendations let me know):
Neoliberal economist of education Chad Aldeman has a blog devoted to the topic. I'd like to read it thoroughly.
Michael McCarthy's book from a few years ago, Dismantling Solidarity, would be a great read on this front and I've been meaning to look at it more closely.
Rereading Glass and Vanatta, particularly their bibliography.
Left wing public finance scholar Amanda Kass has a blog series on pension funding, focusing on Chicago, that I'd like to read more deeply.
There was a recent special issue of Educational Researcher on teacher pensions.
Again, if you have any more ideas on this front let me know! I'm particularly interested in stories or writings that might connect to the question/idea my neighbor had viz. pensions and organizing.