Worker vs. Worker — Guess Who Loses

There are a couple of articles on pensions in today's paper: Private-Sector Anger Builds as Public Pension Costs Rise and Workers Get a Double Jolt on Pension Benefits.

The second article simply lays out a couple ways in which laws have been changed in order to short-change public-sector workers out of their Social Security. There is, of course, little movement by politicians to fix this, since it means several billion dollars per year that they can spend elsewhere.

The first article talks about supposedly growing resentment by those in the private sector against public-sector workers who are set to receive pensions. They present it as if these are grass-roots organizations of people opposed to paying more taxes to fund "underfunded" public pension funds. The article doesn't bother to track down who "Americans for Prosperity" is, but a quick search shows that they are an established lobbying group. Pure astroturf. The article hints at this later when it talks about how this organization as well as the Heritage Foundation are pushing for the destruction of pensions. Oh yeah, and there's that windfall Wall Street would get from switching all that money into 401(k) pits.

What is truly disgusting is that there are union people supporting this idea. What it boils down to, of course, if that these officials already betrayed their base by letting the companies steal their pensions. This, without challenging the fact that pensions cannot be underfunded because of any fault on the workers' part. In many cases, they aren't even underfunded, but when combined with CEO pensions, suddenly they look to be in dire straits since those pensions are underfunded (mostly because they are so bloated in the first place).

Fact is, as long as this attitude predominates, kiss pensions good-bye, along with health care, safe working conditions, and wages. Even the public-sector unions who say correctly that their pensions should be kept and should be the standard ... well, as long as they don't take up the fight and spread it to the rest of the working class, they are gone.