6-02-05,9:05am

You may have seen the bumper sticker that says “Unions: the folks who brought you the weekend.” You can also say “the folks that brought you Social Security.” In the dark days of the Depression, a rising union movement gave President Roosevelt essential support to create Social Security, in an era when the unions also pushed for the 40-hour work week, paid leave, workman’s comp, pensions, and the minimum wage.

Will Perry was a teenager when Social Security was created. Now in his eighties, he came to Department of Ecology headquarters to talk about Social Security and the organization he is President of, the Puget Sound Alliance for Retired Americans. This group is the local Chapter of the Alliance for Retired Americans. The ARA works nationally as part of a broader coalition, the Leadership Council of Aging Organization, which includes other groups such as AARP. They also work with groups such as NOW and NAACP to protect benefits for the elderly.

Perry began by discussing “the sustained attack on the Social Security Administration itself”. He described how senior employees are retiring, the positions left unfilled, causing a steadily increasing workload, offices closing, and jobs contracted out, and face-to-face service replaced with call centers. Federal employee unions are resisting as their contract provisions are attacked “section by section”. Disability services are particularly affected. As Perry says, “one way to eliminate a program you don’t like is to starve it to death.”

He talked about how right-wing think tanks have been campaigning against Social Security with two ideas: the “system is in crisis”, and “privatization is the solution”. He is worried that this kind of brainwashing is working, particularly on younger people who are losing faith that Social Security will be there for them when they retire. But Perry described the think tank campaign as a “two-fold lie propagated for 20 years”, and explained why the system is not in crisis.

Actuaries in the Social Security Administration work on 75-year projections of system solvency, and they are predicting full benefits until 2042. A Congressional study saw no problem until 2052. These projections use conservative assumptions about the economy. Perry complains that the right-wing critics and the Bush administration try to have it both ways. They predict a crisis in Social Security based on the worst possible economy, but crow about the benefits of stock market investments based on the best possible economic scenario. But as Perry points out, under a scenario of poor economic performance as used by the Actuaries as a conservative assumption, the stock market would be performing poorly too.

Perry described Social Security as a “social insurance” program, not an “investment scheme”. He reminded listeners that 96% of workers pay in and 90% get benefits, and that 30% of Social Security goes not to retirees, but to the disabled and to survivors of premature deaths of the breadwinner, including 5 million children. It is a “family protection plan”, which no private plan could ever replace at a comparable cost.

He criticized the Bush Administration proposals as “so full of holes, I don’t know where to begin.” He described his son, who as a 54-year old musician and part-time bartender will need social security, but “doesn’t know a bond from a stock”. Bush says a privatized system will let citizens make choices about investment, but then says the government will decide. And Perry is particularly concerned about the wedge being driven between young and old. The Bush plan is “an attempt to pit generation against generation”, while Social Security unites generations as “a blanket that protects us all.”

Perry offered solutions to improve the solvency of Social Security. “Scrap the Cap” is their slogan, which means requiring the rich to pay Social Security taxes and also taxing non-wage income such as interest and stock dividends. This would raise so much additional funding, says Perry, that taxes on the first $10,000 workers earn could be rebated to workers, and benefits could be increased by one-third.

A retiree, he reminded the audience that a privatized system would not provide COLA adjustments like Social Security does, and that administrative costs would require annuities that would drain benefits. Social Security has provided 65 years of steady, timely payments at an administrative cost of around one percent. Perry challenged any privatized investment scheme to equal the efficiency of a well-run government program.

Perry warned of Bush’s latest proposal to change benefit calculations. He described the proposed switch from “wage indexing” to “price indexing” as a “time bomb” that steadily erode benefits. For example, someone retiring in 2005, who would be getting 42% salary replacement, would only be getting 17% salary replacement if price indexing was in place for the last 45 years. He also warned against misplaced compromise which could damage the system.

In conclusion, he encouraged state employees to get active on this issue and support the unions who are among the strongest supporters of Social Security. Perry has worked a variety of jobs, and has belonged to the Pulp and Paper workers union and the Washington Federation of Teachers. His colleagues who joined him for his talk had been active in the Machinists union and the SEIU Nurses union. He noted that union members are usually automatically enrolled in the Alliance for Retired Americans when they retire, but that anyone of any age can join. For more information, look for their newsletter “The Retiree Advocate”, or contact them at (206) 448-9646 or pscsc@qwest.net.



--Paul Pickett is a public employee and trade union activist in Washington State.