Another morning, another pension meeting with teachers. This time with a large group in the Franklin school auditorium.
Colleagues had lots of good ideas on how to make our unpaid hours of work more visible. This is a common concern everywhere I go.
There were other concerns.
People don’t realize how many hours we put in off the clock. People don’t realize we don’t get social security. People don’t realize we pay 9.5% into our pension. People don’t realize that we are public employees, so of course the taxpayer pays for our compensation, including part of our retirement.
Here were my suggestions.
This summer our lobby efforts must shift somewhat from targeting legislators to targeting our union leadership. If the leadership stays strong, we can defeat a pension robbing bill in the Fall veto session. If the leadership caves, it will be that much harder to stop a pension bill in the Fall.
When we get back to school in August we must shift back to the General Assembly, making the Spring effort seem puny in comparison.
It may take the perfect storm, but we can kill the bill.
Thanks to the Franklin teachers who took time this morning to talk.
Fred Klonsky 
Thanks for the post. I agree that a huge part of our problem as teachers is that our PR efforts are not as strong as that of the corporatizers. I know that most teachers at my school work at least an hour or two at school before they clock out. Can we get access to the total number of teacher hours worked based on our timeclock punches? This is, of course, not including all the late nights, early mornings and weekends that many of us work when no Kronos clock is keeping track of us.
Did you see the news of the grade-in in California? Well-received.