Public Employee Press

City workers say: Don't blame us

As a long-time city worker, Sewage Treatment Workers Local 1320 President James Tucciarelli gets livid at media suggestions that DC 37 members and retirees are bilking the pension system.

He feels aggrieved because the recent attacks on public employee pensions never tell the story of the sacrifices and huge risks municipal workers took on during the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, when their unions let the city use pension funds to avert bankruptcy.

"We are not the ones causing the scandalous abuses," said DC 37 Retirees Association President Stuart Leibowitz. He pointed out that managers - not former front-line workers like DC 37 retirees - account for many of the high pensions cited in the alarmist media attacks.

Although employees are not the source of the problems, the pension systems of a number of municipalities and states are in trouble.

New Jersey, for instance, did not contribute a penny to its pension system for many years, leading the federal Securities and Exchange Commission to cite the state for pension fraud last month.

Tucciarelli noted also that in some years New York City has cut the amount of its required contributions by reducing the earnings target of the pension investments portfolio.

But unfunded pension liabilities are generally caused by stock market downturns rather than employers' failure to consistently fund the pensions. New York City's pension system suffered big losses in fiscal years 2008 and 2009 because of the market crash, but early this year the assets of the five pensions reached $100 billion, making up for most of that loss.

Steve Kreisberg, associate director of research and collective bargaining at DC 37's parent union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said the concern about the nation's estimated $1 trillion in pension liabilities should be viewed in the long-term. The shortfall must be met over a period of three decades - the career of a typical worker - and is therefore quite manageable, he said.

Leibowitz said opponents of traditional pensions are using the economic downturn and the natural fluctuations in investment earnings to ­heighten concern about the financial health of public- employee pension systems.