IEA Board of Directors discuss sell-out plans. Issue #6: Taxing retirement benefits.

It has been a long hard slog for rank-and-file IEA members these past six years.

It has been tough on us having the leadership of IEA President Ken Swanson, VP Bob Blades and Secretary Cinda Klickna, along with former Executive Director and now senior adviser to Arne Duncan, Jo Anderson and his successor as IEA Director, Audrey Soglin.

This has been a leadership of Eeyores, with no stomach for the fight necessary to keep teacher and union rights.

• We were among the few state delegations at the last RA to oppose the resolution condemning Race to the Top.
• Early on, Swanson wrote a glowing description of DC schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, describing her as a “change agent.”

That should have been a red flag for what was in store for us.

• Soglin headed the governors committee that prepared the legislation that was to qualify Illinois for Race to the Top. This included taking away local bargaining rights related to teacher performance. Because of her efforts, the legislature made linking teacher evaluation to student performance a mandatory part of local bargaining. Soglin called this a victory for collective bargaining.

In spite of selling out member collective bargaining rights the state lost out on Race to the Top.

But we get to keep the rule changes. Heck of a job, Audrey.

• When the student members of the IEA pleaded with Swanson at last year’s RA to uphold our long-standing promise not to engage in negotiations over reducing future retirement benefits, Swanson and Soglin brushed them aside. They argued for a need to “sit at the table and leave everything open for discussion.” A week later the legislature, under the orders of Speaker Mike Madigan, created a two-tier system for TRS. It drastically reduced pension benefits for teachers hired after this January 1st.

The “sit-at-the-table” strategy sold future teachers down the river.

At the most recent IEA Board of Directors meeting Swanson presented a document he called the “Challenging Issues” list. Rather than being a road map for struggle in defense of hard-won rights of union teachers, it is a list that includes at least three white flag issues.

These are issues that would surrender to the anti-union Reformers the very core of what counts as union protections and benefits.

On Friday I referred to the issue of taxing TRS benefits.

Item #6 on the list of Challenging Issues is this:

“Promoting a pension ramp restructuring, and looking at the taxation of pension benefits above a given threshold for all retirement income. This would come with a guarantee that those dollars would go directly into funding the pension funds without a shell game played with offsetting reduced contributions from the state.”

After two decades of the state refusing to meet their pension obligations to TRS, Swanson and crew want to discuss the possibility of retirees having their benefits taxed by the state so that we fund our own system AFTER we’ve retired.

That’s not a challenging issue. That’s bullshit.

Tommorrow: The IEA President had the Board of Directors discuss the another challenging issue. What can the IEA do to streamline the process of firing teachers?

Advertisement