One of the main reasons to get a job — if you can — is to make sure that when you’re too old to work you and your family can still make it by, and hopefully in a comfortable manner. So retirement security is a key part of the workforce equation — too heavy on the benefits side and it’s prohibitive to hire an employee, and too low means employees can’t retire the way they’d planned.
Enter The Daily Caller, which ties news of new legislation shifting the cost of union pension funds to taxpayers to a recent report from the Hudson Institute, which found the average union staff plan is funded at over 95 percent, while the average funding percentage of a rank-and-file member’s pension plan is 79 percent.
“Unions are pay and benefits experts — they know this stuff six ways to Sunday, it’s their raison d’etre,” said Brett McMahon, the Vice President of Miller and Long Construction and a member of the national trade association Associated Builders and Contractors. ”It’s not as if they can claim some kind of ignorance about this, that by chance or happenstance these are funded better than those. They know exactly what they’re doing.”
The higher pension contributions to the staff plans come straight from the dues paid by union members, according to the Hudson Institute. In fact, the main reason union leaders are so eager for new recruits, the study found, was to bankroll the failing collectively bargained pension plans.
“You’re not supposed to pay yourself first, but they do, and they pay themselves quite well, and then they appear to bargain for their membership,” said McMahon. “If they were really dedicated to what they were doing, which I think at [one] point they were, decades ago, it wouldn’t look like this.”
“The truth is that we feel sorry for [the rank-and-file members],” added McMahon. “I don’t believe that the leaders didn’t see it coming — these people are experts.”
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Taxpayers: Bailing Out Union Pension Funds
One of the main reasons to get a job — if you can — is to make sure that when you’re too old to work you and your family can still make it by, and hopefully in a comfortable manner. So retirement security is a key part of the workforce equation — too heavy on the benefits side and it’s prohibitive to hire an employee, and too low means employees can’t retire the way they’d planned.
Enter The Daily Caller, which ties news of new legislation shifting the cost of union pension funds to taxpayers to a recent report from the Hudson Institute, which found the average union staff plan is funded at over 95 percent, while the average funding percentage of a rank-and-file member’s pension plan is 79 percent.
The DC talked to a business owner who doesn’t like what he sees:
The Hudson Institute’s Diana Furchtgott-Roth was on CNBC last night to discuss the issue: