A conservative group ended its attempt to put an initiative gutting the pensions of California's public workers on November's ballot. The group, California Pension Reform, blamed Attorney General Kamala Harris for their stalled effort; she issued a title and summary for their measure that weren't as misleading as they would have liked:
The group wanted to emphasize that the measures would stop pension system abuses and reduce pension costs. The attorney general's title and summary said the initiatives would reduce "benefits for current and future public employees, including teachers, nurses, and peace officers, but excluding judges."
The California
legislature will continue to actively consider some kind of pension reform, but will do so without the looming threat of a campaign to really brutalize retiring public workers.
Workers typically bargain for pensions in exchange for lower wages during their working years, but in recent decades corporations have waged war on pensions. If you work for a business and aren't a union member or a top executive, chances are pensions are a thing of the distant past. If you're a union member, there's a good chance your company is trying to blame your pension for any financial problems it's having. More recently, the war on pensions has moved to public workers, with, in many cases, states demanding workers accept pension cuts due to "crises" ginned up by the states failing to put money into the pension funds as they've agreed to do.
Supposed pension crises are also often fabricated—for instance, it is just coming to light that the mayor of San Jose, California, has been massively overstating the city's pension obligations in order to push huge budget cuts and extract concessions from the city's workers. With the city's official projection for 2015 retirement costs at $400 million, the mayor repeatedly cited a projection of $650 million. That's a quarter of a billion more than the official number—something more than a minor or innocent exaggeration. Unions have filed ethics complaints, but with the mayor's false claims having been the basis for a campaign around a ballot initiative that will come to a vote in June, significant damage may already have been done.
It may be rare for a mayor to create a crisis using claims quite that false, but when it comes to pensions, fake crises abound. That's because pensions represent some of the last big pots of money belonging to working people. If corporations or governments can find a way to take those, they will.