Welcome back from your well-deserved summer vacation.

This is going to be an exciting school year, starting with the primary elections on Sept. 10 for mayor, comptroller and other city offices. In our city, the mayor and the comptroller play important roles in protecting the retirement security of UFT members. Both have representatives on the Teachers’ Retirement Board that oversees the Teachers’ Retirement System.

The UFT believes its endorsed candidates will support our members’ retirement needs — Bill Thompson for mayor and Scott Stringer for comptroller. If you are a registered Democrat living in New York City, make sure you cast a ballot on the 10th for both Thompson and Stringer.

Retirement security, then and now

This past July marked the 48th anniversary of Medicare, the federal program that provides affordable health insurance protection for Americans aged 65 and older and forms a key part of our retirement security.

President Lyndon Johnson signed both the Medicare and Medicaid programs into law in 1965 over the opposition of the same type of groups who are today fighting the Affordable Care Act. It took years for Medicare to become the popular program that it is today. Years from now, the Affordable Care Act will be just as well-regarded.

Another vital retirement program, Social Security, celebrated its 78th anniversary in August of this year. Signed into law by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1935, Social Security’s retirement benefits amount to about 25 percent of final salary for teachers and a higher percentage for school secretaries and paraprofessionals.

Detroit and Chicago

You have probably read about the funding problems of the teachers’ retirement systems in Detroit and Chicago. The governments of both cities failed to make their required contributions, leading to a severe underfunding of their retirement systems and talk that benefits already earned might be reduced.

This was almost inevitable considering the lack of adequate funding by both cities and the terrible investment market results of the first several years of this century. We are carefully watching the outcomes in Detroit and Chicago and, through the National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems and the AFT, we will give as much support as we can to protect our colleagues.

New York City is very different. The UFT and other municipal labor unions have insisted that the city make its required pension fund contributions every year. Still, our funds are below where we would like them to be due to the collapse of the information-technology bubble that caused stock market losses for an unprecedented three years in a row in 2000, 2001 and 2002. That was followed by an even greater stock market loss in 2008 after the housing market crashed.

But here is where we differ from Detroit and Chicago: New York City has made its required contributions to offset the disappointing performance in stocks during that period. Since 2000, the city’s overall contribution to its five public retirement systems has increased from $1.4 billion to more than $8 billion. Those required contributions are likely to begin to decline in the next couple of years as our investments begin again to grow in value.

Rest assured that the UFT and its allies in the municipal labor unions will protect our pensions.

A wealth of resources

In many defined-benefit pension plans, participants have no idea how their plan works, how much they can expect to receive in retirement or when they will become vested (guaranteed a benefit upon retirement). UFT members need never lack such knowledge. The UFT seeks to keep you informed in many ways, including:

• this column, which appears in each issue of the New York Teacher
• a pension newsletter, PensioNews
• fact-filled pension handbooks
• speakers at chapter meetings and faculty conferences
• pension consultants in each borough office to answer questions by phone or at in-person consultations
• boroughwide meetings on Tax-Deferred Annuities and other current issues
• the Ready-or-Not program for members who are five to 10 years from retirement
• pension clinics for all tiers for those who are two to three years from retirement
• a final pension consultation for members who are about to retire
• three teacher-members who represent you on the Teachers’ Retirement Board
• up-to-date information on the union’s website at www.uft.org/our-benefits/pension.

The papers you need

Every UFT member should set up and maintain a file of important pension-related papers, which should be accessible to a trusted person and should include copies of:

• your up-to-date designation of beneficiary forms for the qualified pension plan and (if you participate, and we hope you do) for the Tax-Deferred Annuity program
• your most recent annual benefits statement which, among other things, has a record of your credited service and a listing of your beneficiaries
• your most recent quarterly account statements for the qualified pension plan and the Tax-Deferred Annuity program
• any other document relevant to your retirement benefits, such as a tier change or other correspondence from the retirement system.