What are we actually doing to fix Tier 6?

For months now, UFT members have been told that ‘Tier 6 will be fixed,’ and that for UFT, NYSUT, or the AFL-CIO to get it fixed, we’d need to donate to COPE. In a longer piece, I wrote about this general strategy, which unfortunately had all the fixings of an advertisement to get members to donate to COPE, with little evidence that those COPE funds were being used for pension reform purposes. Indeed, UFT members in the opposition are often critical of COPE: (1) because it valorizes outsourced lobbying tactics over rank-and-file action; (2) because COPE has a certain opacity, with members having no real sense of how it is used; and (3) COPE can often be worse than opaque – we have evidence it is used for things that don’t actually help members (like electing Eric Adams, writing/revising legislation that would hurt retirees, etc.). It’s also unclear where the money came from to fund Mulgrew’s controversial congestion pricing lawsuit, and hard to say whether it would be worse if that money came from our union dues, our COPE dollars, or both.

The sense that NYSUT and the UFT’s ‘fix Tier 6’ campaign was nothing but a COPE drive—a way to exploit Tier 6 as a way to generate money to do other things that benefited UFT leadership but not UFT membership—was buttressed by a finding at our most recent UFT Executive Board meeting that, months after the campaign began, there was no knowledge in UFT leadership either of what legislation was being proposed or which politicians were for/against such legislation.

This dilemma, that Tier 6 was being used as an advertising campaign, also seemed to crop up with respect to the politicians who were seen advocating for the Tier 6 campaign. Robert Jackson, for instance, was sending out communications about leading the charge to fix Tier 6, but without pointing to any new legislation. Members of the UFT opposition pointed this out to him, and just this week, to his credit, he did put forward a bill. You can read this bill in its entirety here. In an email that he sent supporters, he described it thusly:

“The bill primarily focuses on adjusting the calculation of final average salary across various retirement systems. It proposes amendments to both the retirement and social security law and the administrative code of the city of New York, specifically addressing the calculation of final average salary for pension benefits. This legislation is designed to ensure that members of public retirement systems in Tiers 5 and 6 receive comparable benefits to those already available to Tier 4 members regarding the calculation of their final average salary. By providing pension equity to these members, the bill seeks to promote fairness within the system.”

If this bill, once it has been through various stages of revision, ends up passing in a form that does what it advertises, that would be a good thing. As those who came to NAC’s Tier 6 webinar, or read through the adjoining PowerPoint, written predominately by NAC TRS candidate Ben Morgenroth, know: the final average salary calculation is definitely a problem. For technical reasons, Ben’s research shows that Tier 6 members currently have final average salaries calculated based on their best 9 consecutive years, a huge step down from what Tier 4 members get. One of NAC’s pension priorities, for that reason, is getting that number down to one: final average salaries should be calculated based on the best single year of our careers. Therefore, if Jackson is successful in getting us there or closer to there, his bill will be a good thing.

Strangely, UFT has not sent out any communications about Jackson’s bill. Members have not been contacted to support it by reaching out to their representatives, for instance. It will be interesting, opacity permitting, to see if our COPE funds actually end up going to getting that bill passed into law in a form that is completely positive. This needs to be on our radar.

But before closing, I want to highlight another part of Jackson’s communication to supporters, because, as the apparent leader of NYS reforms to Tier 6, his proclamations are important to understanding where supportive legislators’ heads are at. Note this passage here: “Proposals include standardizing employee pension contribution rates at 3%, reducing vesting time to five years, and aligning multipliers with earlier tiers to bolster retirement benefits for future retirees. Additionally, lowering the retirement age for Tier 6 members to 55 after 30 years of service and recalculating final average salaries akin to Tier 4 members are key objectives.”

Interestingly, this may be a slightly dated passage, as one of those things, reduced vesting time, has already happened. But the idea of a standardized pension contribution rate of 3%, while welcome to those of us paying about 6%, does beg the question: is there going to be a movement to rid ourselves of the lifetime Tier 6 pension tax? Note that there is nothing here about ending contributions after 10 years, which was the case for conventional Tier 4 members. That’s something that needs to be addressed. And a 25-55 option, rather than a 30-55 option, would also be welcome, especially at the current stage, in which most pension reforms put forward by supportive politicians are, if anything, likely to be watered down to appease less supportive politicians, before they end up in a final form and perhaps passing.

Finally, we need to be cognizant that the only pension reforms that have been put forward legislatively are relatively minor: reduced vesting time (which passed, but was likely more of a benefit to solvency considerations in TRS than to members leaving teaching after five years) and a shorter period of time to be calculated for final average salary (which would still, at the moment, substantively affect only the small percentage of teachers who will actually make it to the retirement age of 63, many, many, years into the future). In other words, our excessive retirement age, and our equally excessive ‘tier 6 pension tax’ have been well-articulated by UFT leadership and politicians, but appears nowhere near the form of a bill, let alone a law.

As politicians and UFT leaders solicit donations from us with the promise of fixing Tier 6, we need to hold them to (1) getting bills written and put forward; (2) making sure those bills focus on the most critical pieces of Tier 6 issues – the excessive and lifelong ‘pension tax’, along with the absurd retirement age of 63. And as COPE-contributing UFT members, we need to make sure that when bills come up to fix any aspect of Tier 6, that we are on the ground mobilizing to make sure those bills pass into law.

And finally, one particularly important way that we can make sure that the UFT’s pension advocates are advocating for the right things is to make sure that we have the right people doing it in the first place. Right now, we have an opportunity to put one of NAC’s own, Ben Morgenroth, on the TRS board. But to do so, we need to make sure to get over 1,000 signatures to even have him on the ballot. If you haven’t printed out the signature sheet out yet (page 2) and gone around to your members, make sure to do so today. You can mail completed signature sheets to the address on the form or deliver it to us in front of 52 Broadway at the next DA.