CTU President Karen Lewis on WTTW’s Chicago Tonight.
What are your thoughts on pensions for teachers?
“I think a lot of people don’t realize that we don’t get social security at all. Pension is the only retirement thing we have outside of individual savings and plans. So it matters to us. I’m a younger teacher, I’m 32, but of course I think about my retirement. I feel really bad for a lot of teachers who are getting out of the system now because they are afraid about their pensions.
I have friends who work in the corporate world who get a bonus at the end of the year or they have a Roth IRA, and it’s built into their compensation package.
We pay into our pension and we contribute, so to say that we are just mooching off taxpayers and that we just want to collect a big fat pension isn’t the case. We work for it; it’s part of our compensation package, and we contribute to it and pay into it. We should make sure that everyone has some type of retirement plan or security.”
Fred Klonsky 