Teacher Wage Theft
Diane Ravitch interrupted me to exclaim, “It’s plain THEFT!”
As we spoke briefly before she made Sunday’s keynote presentation at this year’s Network for Public Education National Conference at the University of Texas in Austin in March, I was very surprised by the spontaneous, harsh verbal emphasis of her tone of voice and the noticeable anger displayed on her brow and in her eyes. She had already assured me that she would include teacher pensions as an issue in her address. Since her address had so many other specific topics, I knew that this inclusion crowded an already crowded set of agenda topics.Since I had been talking with her about some specifics of pension raids against both active and retired teachers, it was this straightforward focus that gave me assurance that we were all in this together.
“It’s plain THEFT!”
In state after state active teachers were being forced by legislatures to increase the amount of money teachers are paying from each paycheck into their pension systems. At the same time the same legislators were saying that pension systems cannot and will not exist in the future. Therefore, legislators are forcing teachers to “save” money while promising them they will never get it back later. This is plain WAGE THEFT.
In state after state dual systems or choice systems force teachers to pay into 401k programs approved by legislators. These 401k programs make upfront profits (fees, handling costs, service charges, or premiums paid for by the teacher and/or employer) from this mandatory savings system while openly stating that the 401k programs will Teacher Wage Theft | Reclaim Reform: