California created nearly one in five of the nation’s new jobs

To be clear, no one “gets” a government pension.Usually a government employee contributes to a pension plan and typically the government makes a contribution as well. As in the government employee takes money from their paychecks and puts it towards their pension. This is true for many companies, the employer will make a contribution to an employee’s retirement plan-usually a 401k retirement account- when the employee does. Sometimes it’s a matching amount, sometimes not. The original idea of a pension plan was driven by union membership, in exchange for accepting lower wages – this is true for public school teachers, and public school employees such as custodians, bus drivers, etc. Certainly true for many other public employees like road crew workers, public safety workers etc.

Pensions were a common benefit of employment until the late 1970s-1980s when deregulation championed by Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party encouraged companies to offer instead IRAs and 401ks. Those plans reduced the corporate contribution, put the burden of wise investment on the employee rather than the company, and allowed the company to eliminate or reduce other retirement benefits, such as healthcare. More Reagan era deregulation of mergers and acquisitions meant that companies like PALCO, that had fully funded pension plans, were subject to corporate raiders (like Hurwitz) who could literally leverage the value of the pension savings as collateral for a hostile takeover, takeover the company and then use the fully funded pension plan for something else entirely. Another reason for companies to stop offering pensions.

Many public sector jobs that offer pensions have minimum qualifications. In the case of a teacher, that is 5 years of university level education, and competency in the subject area. Teachers without a degree usually have significant professional experience directly relevant to their instruction. Farm work generally has no minimum qualifications required. It’s manual labor. Spending a summer picking cotton and tomatoes and tobacco, working in fast food restaurants, waitressing and bartending all convinced me that a university degree was worthwhile.