Bridging the retirement gap

More than 400 UFT members packed Shanker Hall on April 18 for the union’s second Pension Expo, where union leaders and financial experts discussed the growing retirement security gap facing all Americans and urged members to support efforts to guarantee such benefits for all U.S. workers.

Keynote speaker Teresa Ghilarducci, a labor economist and nationally recognized expert on retirement, described the broader picture of retirement prospects for most Americans in stark terms. “U.S. retirement is a failure. Forty percent of middle-class workers are downwardly mobile,” she said in the first half of the event. “A secure retirement should not depend on crowdfunding.”

The UFT and the AFT, its national affiliate, support political efforts to expand retirement security and address what Ghilarducci called the “humanitarian crisis” of workers reaching retirement age with no savings. The AFT supports a bipartisan congressional proposal, the Retirement Savings for Americans Act, which would provide a retirement savings plan and government match for all Americans.

Generations of UFT activists long understood the importance of retirement security and stood strong to ensure a secure and dignified retirement for members, UFT President Michael Mulgrew reminded attendees. “We fought for these benefits — we built these benefits,” he said. “We are the only union that has this.”

Such hard-fought retirement benefits are the admitted envy of many outside the union’s ranks. “Compared to a lot of people in other parts of the country, we have a lot more” options for maximizing retirement savings, including the Tax-Deferred Annuity (TDA), said 3–K teacher and Chapter Leader Lance Schatzman of PS 329 in Coney Island.

Member support for securing retirement benefits for all is not only a humanitarian decision, but a pragmatic one, Ghilarducci told attendees. “If half of workers don’t have a pension,” she said, “it would be very difficult” for those workers to politically support those who do.

UFT members have “the best of both worlds” when it comes to retirement benefits, AFT President Randi Weingarten told attendees: a defined-benefit pension, which guarantees a monthly income for life after retirement, and the TDA, a voluntary retirement savings plan. Members now also have a new Roth option for additional retirement savings.

The guarantees offered by defined-benefit plans, in particular, have evaporated for other workers over the past 40 years, said Weingarten. “But for public employees,” she said, “there are very few other defined-benefit plans anymore.”

After outlining the broader policy picture, the expo, which was organized by pension representative Jeffrey Novzen, turned members’ attention to the practicalities of retirement planning.

Attendees divided into two groups. About 200 members went next door to 50 Broadway to peruse an exhibit hall, attend breakout sessions on the TDA program and the work of the Teachers’ Retirement System (TRS), or receive pension consultations and printouts of their pension calculations.

The remaining attendees stayed in Shanker Hall to hear from TRS trustee Christina McGrath about preparing for retirement. “The more you know, the easier it will be,” she said, encouraging members to schedule a preliminary pension consultation.

Orlando Zalazar, a bilingual school social worker at P811, the Mickey Mantle School, a District 75 program in Manhattan, said he was impressed that such a large event provided individualized consultations for each member. “It was mind-blowing to go to a conference with 400 people and walk out with customized information specific to me,” he said. He was especially thrilled that his pension consultant, teacher Michael Agovino, was able to locate a forgotten Board of Education Retirement System (BERS) account with a balance of $5,000 from Zalazar’s previous career. “It was like a rabbit out of a hat,” he marveled. “Honestly, it’s a great service.”