Submitted by Michael Shedlock via MishTalk.com,
Chicago teachers have a 13% raise (over four years) offer on the table, but that is not enough. They set a strike date of October 11 because the city wants the union to contribute more than 2% for their underfunded pensions, among the worst funded pensions in the nation.
The Chicago public school system is bankrupt. Its bonds are deep in junk status.
If mayor Rahm Emanuel had any brains, he would be begging Governor Bruce Rauner and House Speaker Michael Madigan for legislation that would allow municipalities and taxing bodies the right to declare bankruptcy.
There are two words that describe the current state of affairs: Greed and Corruption.
What follows is a guest post courtesy of Union Watch.
Rampant Union Greed in Chicago by Larry Sand
The Windy City’s teachers union is on the verge of yet another strike.
In 2012, Troy Senik wrote “The Worst Union in America,” a title he bestowed on the California Teachers Association. As a former member and longtime critic of that union, I certainly had no quibble with his selection. But now, CTA is facing serious competition from the Chicago Teachers Union.
As reported in last week’s post, CTU, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, is gearing up for a strike. It would be the union’s second in four years, despite the fact that the median salary for a teacher in Chicago is $78,169. When you add another $27,564 for various benefits, the total compensation for a teacher – good, bad or middling – becomes almost $106K per annum. (Please keep in mind teachers work 180 days a year, while employees in other professions typically work for 240 to 250 days.) In retirement, the average Chicago teacher receives a hefty $50,000 a year.
The main sticking point for the union and the Chicago Public School system (CPS) is the so-called pension pick-up. Teachers there (and elsewhere) have what’s called a “defined benefit plan,” whereby in retirement – come hell, high water or recession – a teacher’s pension is not affected. In most places, teachers and the school district share the contributions equally, but not in Chicago and some other municipalities in Illinois. Teachers there are supposed to chip in 9 percent of their salary to fund their own pension. But as things stand now, teachers contribute just 2 percent, with the school district (read: taxpayer) picking up the remaining seven. The city, which is in dire fiscal straits, is asking teachers to pay the full 9 percent. But lest the poor teachers need to reach for the smelling salts because they are being asked to kick in more for their own retirement years, Chicago is offering them an 8.7 percent salary increase over four years to help offset the teachers’ pension payment.
So, as the union demands more and more money, the schools end up with less and less. As reported by the Chicago Tribune, CPS still needs to come up with at least $300 million to balance its fiscal 2017 budget. “The school system still faces huge, $700 million-ish teachers pension payments this year and annually into the future. It still has too much real estate to serve its dwindling number of students. And its credit is maxing out.” As a result, Moody’s has just downgraded CPS further into junk status.
As if the union’s insistence on yet more money is not deplorable enough, there is a new addition to their basket. When CTU held its strike vote last week, it didn’t do it the traditional way – by secret ballot. Nope, the union had its teachers authorize a strike via “petitions” circulated at schools, meaning that everyone knew how everyone else voted. Think there may have been an intimidation factor at work here? And why on earth would they need to resort to such strong-arm tactics? The teachers voted by a 7 to 1 margin to strike in 2012 – when voting was done in private. As it turns out, the margin this year was 86 percent affirmative, just about what it was in 2012.
If the method of voting sounds dictatorial and totalitarian, it fits right in with the union’s leadership. CTU president Karen Lewis, who revels in her inflammatory style, makes Donald Trump look downright demure. Just a few of her egregious comments:
- At the City Club of Chicago in 2013, she blamed the city’s education woes on rich white people. “When will we address the fact that rich, white people think they know what’s in the best interest of children of African Americans and Latinos—no matter what the parent’s income or education level.”
- After the tragic Sandy Hook school shootings, Lewis blamed Teach for America, the organization that successfully enlists high-achieving college graduates to teach at hard to staff schools. Referring to TFA vice-president David Rosenberg, Lewis said “… policies his colleagues support kill and disenfranchise children from schools across this nation.”
- Earlier this year, Lewis compared the Illinois governor to ISIS: “Rauner is the new ISIS recruit. Yes, I said it, and I’ll say it again. Bruce Rauner is a liar. And, you know, I’ve been reading in the news lately all about these ISIS recruits popping up all over the place — has Homeland Security checked this man out yet? Because the things he’s doing look like acts of terror on poor and working-class people.”
- Then there is the typical union boss hypocrisy: She rails against corporate “fat cats,” all the while pulling in over $200,000 a year, owning three homes, including one in Hawaii. (Second-in-command at CTU, Comrade Jesse Sharkey, a leading member of the revolutionary International Socialist Organization, makes well over $100,000 in total compensation.)
The teachers could strike as soon as October 11th. It’s up to Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and Governor Rauner to stand up to the CTU leadership and their outrageous demands and put a halt to the mugging. Enough taxpayer money has been extorted by the union without the mayor and governor kicking in another penny. And the union can’t claim that its teachers are doing a bang-up job: Just 30 percent of 4th grade CPS students are proficient in math and by 8th grade that number sinks to 25 percent. In reading, 27 percent of 4th graders are proficient as are 24 percent of 8th graders. Taxpayers should not be expected to sink any more of their money into an ineffective school system.
As of now, the hard working people of Chicago – already the highest taxed in Illinois – are getting overpaid teachers, failing kids and a union that wears its greed proudly on its sleeve. CTA, you have some serious competition.
Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues.
Hopefully the above article opens up your eyes to what is happening in Chicago.
Chicago offers salaries that are among the best in the nation, provides benefits among the best in the nation, and has schools among the worst in the nation.
Mayor Emanuel was foolish enough to pass a series of tax hikes, the biggest in history, nearly all of which goes straight into the pockets of the unions.
That was not enough for the unions. And it never will be.
Mayor Emanuel, please take your brains, wherever you left them, and put them back in your head. Ask the Governor and Speaker Madigan for bankruptcy legislation.
Bankruptcy is the only solution.
They only get around $106K a year? That’s not nearly enough! And the miserly attitude of the cheap-ass crackers in charge of the money is reflected in the poor grades of both the little Homo-Erectus’s and the illegal immigrant monkeys.
Those teachers should have chauffeured driven limousines pick them up and drop them off every day, from their 3 Million dollars homes to the 3 Billion dollar school, where special teacher lounges serve them gourmet meals and snacks all day by liveried servants (all humble Whites of course), and the only class they actually teach is Gender and Racial Studies.
Okay, all sarcasm aside, this overpaying of teachers and all the other fuktards has gone on long enough. It’s time to face reality. My neighbor has two daughters, both teachers in grade school. One daughter is a rabid Marxist feminist libtard imbecile, and the other daughter is merely a libtard imbecile. Either one would be over paid bussing tables at Burger King. Both are voting for the hildabeast, of course.
One fellow I work part-time with is a retired elementary school gym teacher, and his retirement is $50K a year with full medical for life from the union, and he is very bitter it isn’t more! He was paid $78K a year when he retired, and this is at a rural consolidated school (brand new 10 years ago) where all he would see in the gym was a sea of little White faces.
This overpayment is total bullshit and not only has to stop, it WILL stop, sooner or later as everything goes to shit. Fuck those greedy retards.
No, it will not stop. Government always, ALWAYS gets paid. Even if that means watching others starve.
Book it.
This is the reason I probably will not bother to vote in the presidential election- or at least will not cast might vote for Clinton after all, though I can no longer think who I really COULD support. Democrats have not only enabled, but sponsored, the rape of our taxpaying population by greedy public service unions for seven decades now, since WW2. I simply can’t endure the thought of voting for a Dem, yet there is no way we can seriously believe that her major opposition is going to do anything substantive to reduce the power of either the destructive public service unions, or anger the banking class on which he is dependent in his business.
But never mind Clinton, the real damage is done at the local level. WTF does it take to unseat corrupt incumbent local politicians? What does it take to break the hold that these people have on the minds of the numbwit citizens who vote them in over and over, often for decades, and won’t even sign a petition to get someone else on the ballot? There’s a real disconnect there- I talk to my fellow taxpayers and most are not happy with the way the city is being run- and they are stone furious at the demands of the CTU. Almost none send their kids to public schools, and when they do, they hire private tutors to supplement the inadequate instruction their kids are receiving, meanwhile grousing about the extra money they must spend on a long list of school supplies that the schools once provided. Yet the affluent and well-educated and the common folk alike still worship Daley and still support Ald. Ed Burke, the powerful and tyrannical Chair of the Finance Committee for over 20 years- the two men who have done the most to wreck this city financially, and who have never lifted a finger to resist the greedy demands of our public service unions, possibly because they were too busy voting themselves pay hikes. My Irish-Catholic boyfriend, who was successful and well-educated, worshiped Daley and when he voted, he voted Irish-Catholic, the only consideration that weighed with him. Unfortunately, so do most of the white people in Chicago.
That is the trouble with our electorate, and with democracy in general. People are idiots who support people they identify with, no matter how moronic, unprincipled, and downright vicious those people may be, which is how two troglodytes like Clinton and Trump ended up on their respective tickets.
The major problem is that Chicago’s wealthiest and most powerful people, and its influential upper-middle class, the people who have the most influence and power, don’t care. They believe they will somehow always get theirs, and will be insulated from the destruction of the surrounding society. They benefit greatly from business as usual. They send their children to expensive private schools and somehow seem to take pride in paying obscene property taxes. Only the middle and lower-middle classes truly feel the pain- I am taxed cheaply in my condo, but owners of modest single family homes and 2 & 3-family flats are being destroyed by tax hikes, while small business owners are being pushed either out of business or out of the state by the predatory city bureaucracy,and oppressive fees and taxes. Our upper classes don’t care- after all, they work for businesses that are the beneficiaries of generous tax breaks and subsidies promulgated to lure major businesses to the city, never asking how the city benefits from the presence of businesses that are not net taxpayers but welfare recipients on a massive scale.
A political leader with principles, guts, and a grasp of 6th grade arithmetic would tell the CTU’s rank and file members in no uncertain terms that, due to the city’s shrinking tax base, and the stagnating and declining incomes of the taxpayers, there will be NO raise, and the members will have to make a meaningful contribution of at least 25% to their own pensions. And that, furthermore, the minimum retirement age will be raised to 60 barring proven disability…. and that the teachers will be expected to be at in their classrooms and striking members will be filed and replaced even if it means replacing 75% of the teachers. There are thousands of young college grads who would be grateful for an opportunity to graduate from their jobs as baristas and sales clerks, to a job that starts at about $50K a year and works you only 9 months a year.
Wow, excellent rant.
+1,000
Let them strike and we can watch and see if the murder rate goes up because if they were paid for their production or better yet make them go in the other days they would be off and teach in the jails filled with the people they failed to reach and teach
There is some important guy from that cesspool of a state. He spreads his way to an entire nation successfully. Now we are all Chi town. Man I just can’t recall his name. I guess I just stopped caring. Collapse is happening now. It is not going to happen and it will not be stopped.
The original story appeared at Union Watch, whose byline is “Reporting the Problems with Unionized Government.” Think you’re gettin’ both sides of this story?
Unions generally get no respect around here as well as in most of the country. Chicago is different, it’s a union town, or at least it was. That’s changing of course because it’s lost most of it’s manufacturing jobs, a reflection of most of the country. But for a time, unions will still wield some power over government, such as it is, in Chicago.
Too bad really. Unions were largely responsible for the U.S. gaining a sizable middle class. And as a buttress to corporate power they gave the little guy a chance for a seat at the table. But things change, don’t they. Fascism has replaced democracy. People no longer count… and corruption is so endemic that an evil witch like the hildabeast can running for the oval office when she should be breaking large rocks into small rocks for the rest of her miserable life, with slick and that spawn as well.
who woulda thunk it
Government employees and doctors are the only people who when they fail to do the job adequately they still get paid in full and get paid to repeat the same task in an attempt to get right again . In any other situation when you supply a service and that service fails you either refund the customer or fix it free !
I wonder if they complain when the mechanic or plumber does not get it right the first time . Teachers send their failures out the door and doctors bury theirs
For me, this is a story about how decent and very smart people become FUCKING MORONS when their own self-interests are at stake.
I’m talking about Ms Freud’s daughter …. who calls every single day …. who has a Masters in math from Purdue ….. and, who teaches high school math …. in Chicago.
Those every day phone calls? Involves bitching about how much she hates her job … for two reasons …. the “students” are feral and dumb, and the Administrators feral, dumb, and lazy.
Oh, yeah, she bitches about getting screwed on the pension deal. Really, she’s a very smart woman. When she was here this past summer I actually tried to explain the concepts in this article to her. It was like talking to a brick wall. As if her brain turned into corn mush. “I WANT MINE!!!”
And, doesn’t that describe every single voter this election?
We’re fucked.
Most people, public or private who are thinking they are going to be getting fat and luxurious pensions in the future are going to end up with rather niggardly ones at best, maybe none at all.
(At least not with money being paid them that is worth anywhere near as much as it is today.)
When the taxpayer is drained then the money runs out and when the money runs out it runs out.
There is no way to pay pensions without the money being there to do it.
If the teachers only get a 13% increase over four years, that is 3.35% per year, and then, if they have to pay 2%, of that, into their pension fund, that leaves them with only a 1.25% raise per year. Compare that with the raises that other professionals, and politicians receive, and it is not what you would your teachers to accept. They deserve more, for what they do!!!!
It’s for the children!
Tick, tick, tick.