I'm going to bed, and expect the FReepathon to be over by the time I wake up. Next Thursday. ":^)
Posted on 03/05/2016 7:23:14 PM PST by george76
Pension holidays, steep increases in teachers' salaries, and lopsided ratios of teacher contributions to pension payouts have caused the Chicago Teachers’ Pension Fund’s unfunded liabilities to shoot up to $9 billion in 2015.
The Chicago Teachers Union, or CTU, has threatened to strike as early as April 1 over the issue of teacher pension “pickups,” according to the Chicago Sun-Times. Negotiations over a new contract to replace the 2012 contract that expired in June 2015 stalled after CTU rejected the most recent offer from Chicago Public Schools, or CPS, in February. In exchange for pay increases and a moratorium on “economic” layoffs, among other CPS concessions, the contract would have phased out CPS’ practice of “picking up” most of the contributions teachers are required to make toward their pension fund.
After years of pension holidays, overly generous pension benefits, a lack of transparency and rampant cronyism, both the CPS system and the Chicago Teachers’ Pension Fund, or CTPF, are now broke.
...
1. Since 1981, CPS has paid the vast majority of what teachers are supposed to contribute toward their pensions in the form of teacher pension pickups
...
2. Teacher pension contributions are out of sync with payouts. The average career teacher currently receives an annual pension of $73,350 and will receive a lifetime payout of over $2 million.
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5. CTPF debt has grown to more than $9 billion since 1999.
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6. A well-managed pension fund should be fully funded. CTPF is just 51.5 percent funded.
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9. CTPF is actuarially upside down. There are now more inactive employees and beneficiaries in CTPF than there are active workers paying into the pension fund.
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11. Almost 40 percent of teachers retire before age 60.
(Excerpt) Read more at illinoispolicy.org ...
Maybe they can borrow some money from Puerto Rico.
You get Social Security Disability in Puerto Rico if you speak Spanish.
You get Social Security Disability in Puerto Rico if you speak Spanish.
**********************************************************
You get it here if you speak Ebonics.
If you would have button-holed somebody in 1975 and told them that a retired teacher in 2015 would be making $35 an hour, they would have laughed in your face.
I think King Wage for a blue collar guy was like $5-6 bucks an hour.
Who needs economics when you have unions?
I remember the minimum wage back then was $1.65/hr - $5 an hour was top of the line!!!
Us young punks would talk about the guys making $5 an hour in awe.
Does Chicago still have those ‘Rubber Rooms’ for lousy (though salaried) teachers who take years to get fired?
The average hourly pay is closer to &70 per hour. Teachers work six hours per day in the classroom and 180 days per year. If they earn an average of $73,000 that is $67.59 per hour plus benefits for 1080 hours per year in the classroom.
If you make $73,000 as an average office worker working eight hours a day for 260 days a year you make about $35.10 per hour plus benefits. Probably significantly lower quality benefits at that, especially since your likely ‘pension’ is a crappy 401K and the 15 % of your income that you and your employer pay in SS tax to the sucking maw of Government in DC.
Work fifty years pay in hundreds of thousands of dollars and receive exactly $1,200 a month in Social Security, IF YOU LIVE LONG ENOUGH TO COLLECT IT!
Air Illinois state Teacher pensions have bankrupted the state through years of Democrat vote buying with taxpayer money.
I suppose it is a disability for Eskimos who suffer from ‘shrinkage’.
I was making 18-something an hour in 1976 as a journeyman pipe fitter in Chicago. With overtime, I remember clearing 60k a year, which was more than any college degree’d person would earn, but I was working so much overtime, I didn’t even have time to get into good proper trouble.
Teachers were making way less. Those that could produce a better living did so, those that couldn’t, got into teaching. It was a backup profession if you couldn’t get a real paying job (no offense to educators, but it was considered that way at the time).
To put into perspective, you would make more fixing cars than teaching about fixing cars. Auto mechanic teachers were usually retired mechanics. You would make more money working at Bell Laboratories as a chemical engineer than you would teaching chemistry (chemistry teachers were often retired chemists). You’d earn more as a banker than teaching finance, etc.
Times have surely changed. Now for many, being an educator (or getting any government job) is the brass bell.
BTW, I live in Chicago, and we have the worst schools and pay the highest for our teachers in the nation, yet the only answer I ever hear to solve our school problems is “we need more money”.
If this was science, one could say “well the more you smoke the sicker you get” and by the same token “the more money you spend on teachers the worse the results”
If people can see the correlation between one, then why not the other?
Straw man to be sure, but then again... maybe not.
I had a buddy who was a union rigger in Chicago. I saw one of his paystubs from the early 80s. It blew my hair back. :)
I don’t know.
There seems to be a lot of baby Eskimos.
And you know the old saying for the ladies.....
“Once you go Eskimo
You’ll have frostbite on your behind.”
I think it rhymes in eskimoese.
To simplify thought & calculations about these issues, I generally assign 2000 hours annually, 50 weeks a year, 40 hours a week.
Obviously, the teacher summer break is an anomaly, but the point still stands about 40 years ago. :)
Unions consider government pensions to be their personal pyramid schemes financed by the taxpayer.
Aw, this is really, really terrible.
They should move to GA., take early retirement so they can be rehired as consultants making six digit salaries..
I'm going to bed, and expect the FReepathon to be over by the time I wake up. Next Thursday. ":^)
Boo Hoo. And to think most merely put in their time in loser schools. What a crime against Chicago children.
Democrats.
It's Democrats who've been in charge of Chicago for decades and decades. The *worst* of the Chicago Teacher Pension crisis happened under no less than Mayor Richard M. Daley (son of former mayor Richard J. Daley, who during the 1968 Democrat Convention riots here in Chicago said "the police aren't here to create disorder, the police are here to preserve disorder!")
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