Those on the team got guaranteed inflated pensions in return for their votes. The rest of us got 401(K) plans and, if we were lucky, the company would maybe match up to 3%.
My parents were both government workers for the state university system in North Dakota during their final working years.
This was long before the oil boom when the state was one of the poorest in the nation. They figured out they could no longer guarantee pensions in the mid 1970s and replaced them all with 401(K) type plans.
Believe it or not, it was a Democrat governor and a GOP legislature who figured that out long before it became a national topic. End result is that North Dakota has one of the most secure state retirement systems in the country with no tax increase because most of it was funded by the workers. Novel concept. I think there are a handful of other states which adopted the same system (Wyoming, Utah) with the same result.
It isn't a difficult system when it isn't used as a vote buying scheme.
There'll be blood in the streets when they resort to this in California.