The County’s Workforce Gives While The County’s Elite Taketh Away
You have probably read quite a bit lately about public employee pensions. For some people, public employees and our benefits, particularly our pension benefits, have become undeserving targets. To hear these folks pontificate you would think that public employee pension benefits, rather than the unregulated private sector, caused the global economic collapse.
The truth about our pension benefits is much different than our critics would have people believe. Here are the facts:
• OCEA-represented employees have always paid and continue to pay the entire amount of the employee contribution as determined by the Orange County Employees Retirement System.
• Since 2004, OCEA-represented employees have even paid a portion of the County’s employer contribution.
• This past year OCEA and the County negotiated a truly innovative option that provides new employees (and we believe soon current employees) the ability to select (and pay more for) a straight defined benefit plan, or in the alternative select a lesser defined benefit plan combined with a defined contribution plan. In both cases, OCEA-represented employees will continue to pay their entire employee contribution and a portion of the employer contribution.
• Far from the $100,000 club of executives the media has been so obsessed with recently, the average pension of retired OCEA members is less than $29,000 per year.
• Further, OCEA-represented employees do not earn any social security credits.
That’s the truth about your retirement benefits. But it’s not the whole story.
As I wrote in a recent op-ed piece in The Register, there are 515 County employees receiving pensions of more than $100,000 annually. Many of them get over $200,000. The list of those pension recipients reads like a who’s who of former County honchos. Virtually all of them were County executives or managers. Many of them are still working in the public sector, some as consultants, many others as employees.
But unlike you, these former County executives and managers paid little or nothing towards their retirement.
You would think that in today’s world this would have all changed by now. But it hasn’t. Today’s County executives and managers are more than ready to implement layoffs and furloughs and readily call for you and other rank-and-file employees to do more with less. Yet those same executives and managers are content to sit by silently like the cat that ate the canary while the County pays the employee portion of their retirement contributions. And that’s not all. On top of their pensions, senior County executives also receive a generous eight percent 401(k) style benefit entirely paid for by the County.
So how do executives and managers justify the County continuing to pay for their retirement? The only explanation is that they view themselves as a privileged elite. Because they think they constitute an elite, they believe they are entitled to be treated differently than you.
I’ve been saying it for years and I’ll continue to say it – that attitude is despicable. County executives and managers who won’t pay their fair share shouldn’t feel entitled, they should be embarrassed.
In solidarity,
Nick Berardino
OCEA General Manager
