Union PensionAnd Benefit Reforms Must Include Police, Fire

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Investors Business Daily:

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's victory over recall activists is rightly viewed as a nationwide rebuke to the public-sector union movement, and a sign the pendulum is swinging back in the direction of taxpayers.

Walker's win protects his Act 10 reforms that restricted collective bargaining power and reduced pension and other benefit costs within his state's public sector.

This was indeed a huge victory — one with national implications, as other states wrestle with oppressive pension debt and union work-rule restrictions that make contracting out and other cost savings impossible.

But it wasn't as big as it should have been because Walker and his allies exempted most police officers and firefighters from the reforms.

This exemption makes a certain amount of tactical sense, given that the public tends to view these "public safety" officials in a different light than they do various other categories of bureaucratic and government workers.

But leaving cops, firefighters and other categories of public safety workers untouched would indeed leave much of the pension problem unaddressed.

It also evades the heart of the public-employee issue. Police, fire, prison guards and other aspects of the ever-expanding categories of public safety workers (milk inspectors, university security guards, billboard inspectors, etc.) enjoy special protections that go beyond what any other category of worker, public or not, can ever hope to enjoy.

For starters, public-safety officials enjoy the most generous retirements. Most agencies in California offer the "3% at 50" retirement for deputies, district attorney investigators, police, firefighters, prison guards and others. That means they receive 3% of their final year's salary times the number of years worked (90% after 30 years) available at age 50.

And that's before all the various pension-spiking gimmicks that often are abused among these categories of workers. Retired police often go on to get new jobs in other retirement systems even after they retire on disability.

The common term "Chief's Disease" refers to the propensity of management-level police officers, especially chiefs, to retire with disabilities. These are rarely sustained by fighting criminals, but almost always involve ailments such as irritable bowel syndrome, back aches and knee problems.

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One step at a time.