Illinois public school teacher pensions are protected. Chicago included.
Having moved to Brooklyn last June I can’t help but keep an eye on the news coming out of my old home town of Chicago.
As a retired teacher and local union president that means following the negotiations that are currently going on between the Chicago Teachers Union and the Chicago Public School board of education and CPS CEO Pedro Martinez.
The negotiations are messy as contract negotiations can often be.
The messiness is not helped by the foot in mouth disease of the current CTU leadership.
I have been involved in too many contract negotiations not to trust the process so long as the process is allowed to proceed with what approximates fairness and transparency.
I have heard from retired CPS teachers that there is a concern that somehow the current negotiations and CPS budget issues will have a negative impact on their pensions.
The funding of CPS teacher pensions has been a hot potato passed around between the city and CPS for years.
Currently the Chicago Teacher Pension Fund is, like most public pensions in Illinois, massively underfunded.
The CTPF is separate from the Illinois Teacher Retirement System.
But a 2015 Illinois Supreme Court Ruling reaffirmed that the language of the Illinois Constitution protects CTPF pensions just like it protects TRS pensions.
Illinois’ 1970 constitution is one of only in two in the nation which explicitly guarantee that state and local employees have a right to pension benefits based on the formula in effect at hire, without reduction, until retirement. (The other is New York.) This is via the “pension protection clause,” Article XIII, General Provisions, Section 5,
“Membership in any pension or retirement system of the State, any unit of local government or school district, or any agency or instrumentality thereof, shall be an enforceable contractual relationship, the benefits of which shall not be diminished or impaired.”
In 2013 when the Illinois state legislature tried to reform us out of their pension obligations we fought back, including filing a law suit.
We won that fight, insuring that all Illinois public employees whether they worked in Chicago, the suburbs or downstate, got what was promised to them.