The long fight for pension fairness

For far too long, Illinois politicians made a habit of treating public employee pensions as a budget line they could shortchange—deferring contributions, borrowing against the future, and hoping the next generation of lawmakers would deal with the mess. They never did.

Politicians kicked the pension can down the road for most of the 20th century, choosing to pay far less in pension contributions than was fiscally prudent. This led to billions in unfunded pension debt that the state should have been steadily paying for decades.

Rather than raising new revenue to pay for the pension liabilities that they had ignored, state politicians took a different, more destructive approach: They backed legislation to cut the pensions of every public employee—be it state workers, university employees, city or county employees, firefighters or teachers. That fight began in earnest in 2010 when corporate interests and a bipartisan group of legislators stepped up their crusade to push through the measure.

Lawmakers knew that cutting pensions would provoke outrage from hundreds of thousands of public employees, so they focused their initial effort on a measure that only cut pensions for those hired after the effective date of the act, January 1, 2011. AFSCME and other unions vigorously opposed the measure, but it was difficult to mobilize strong resistance because no current union member of that time would be impacted.

Gov. Pat Quinn wasted no time in signing the bill into law. Thus Tier 2 was created.

Then in 2013, the politicians tried to cut pensions again. But this time, they had current employees who had years of public service in their sights.
AFSCME and our union partners in the We Are One Illinois coalition waged a vigorous campaign—including a highly impactful TV ad campaign—to block passage of the measure. But that effort was stymied by political leaders of both parties who were united in supporting the benefit cuts.  And Gov. Quinn again signed the bill into law.

Labor unions argued that the law was blatantly in violation of the pension protection clause in the Illinois Constitution, which says that a pension “shall be an enforceable contractual relationship, the benefits of which shall not be diminished or impaired.”
This means that the state is constitutionally barred from cutting pension benefits for current employees.

So once again, AFSCME and our allies in the We Are One Illinois coalition went into action. The coalition filed a lawsuit to overturn the law, fighting all the way to the Illinois Supreme Court. And it was there that labor carried the day. In 2015 and 2016, the Supreme Court ruled that  laws slashing the pensions of current employees were unconstitutional and, hence, null and void. 

Even though cuts to Tier 1 benefits were overturned, the Tier 2 inadequacy has only grown as more and more “new” employees entered the public workforce. 

Two years ago, the We Are One Illinois coalition reconvened with a goal of fixing the unfair Tier 2 pensions lawmakers had created a decade earlier. 
AFSCME and the coalition put the issue front and center, organizing town halls across the state to educate lawmakers and a large rally in the Capitol rotunda.

But that positive momentum hit a brick wall with the election of Donald Trump, who, along with Republicans in Congress, has pushed through hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts for public services, blowing a big hole in the state’s future budgets, making lawmakers wary of any new spending.
That may set labor back, but it won’t stop us. The We Are One Illinois coalition is continuing to fight for pension fairness, and has vowed to keep fighting for as long as it takes.