Written by Diego Estrada
The incessant push for the unionizing schools is apparent when taking a look at the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS). CalSTRS is desperately looking for new members in hopes of mending and healing its broken pension system.
The priorities of unions have drastically changed over the years from actually caring about and fighting for their members’ needs to sucking resources out of the very people who build it up. This change comes from the terrible priorities of the unions themselves.
CalSTRS has released its financial report for the last year—and they are abysmal. The 11th largest public pension system in the world currently penalizes its well-off members for the mistakes of its irresponsible ones. The CalSTRS fund ration is not individually calculated, which means it doesn’t calculate or differentiate between good behavior—such as increased financial contributions—and bad behavior. Thus, better fiscally-minded members are not rewarded with lower monthly payments.
Because of this, CalSTRS is currently $107 billion in debt and only 64 percent funded. How could they ease this economic scar? Get new members to pay them out!
The reports also show the treatment of new members in this grotesque contribution rate. CalSTRS has a 38.7% contribution rate that participants pay. Once factoring out state funds and payout withdraw, entering CalSTRS with a new set of employees, the employer will only have to come up with nine percent of the funding. Join as a new agency participant, however, and that price tag more than triples to 28 percent.
The report shows how the system could have fixed this, as they have known since 2009 that they needed to raise rates. Nonetheless, CalSTRS continued to lag on this change to pander to the schools. Instead of attacking it at its source, they opted to delay the problem for teachers.
The unions push for this system and attempt to lure charter schools in shows their perverse interests. They resort to corrupt behavior to save them from their own mistakes instead of caring for their members responsibly.
