OK, you convinced me. I withdraw my proposal.
Yeah, I think you are right about the windfall provision.
[quote=“doreen, post:60, topic:792575”]
That article is 2 years old, and only talks about New York. And it doesn’t talk about having enough applicants, it talks about the procedure of screening and testing creating a backlog of applicants, many of which have given up and gone to other jobs in the four years deep the pool is. That’s only a bit over 10k a year, and they hire an average of 1600 a year, with over 2000 planned for that year. That means that, in the most optimistic scenario, nearly than 1 in 6 people who signed up will be hired. I interview more people than that hiring a dog groomer.
The economy has gotten better over the last 2 years as well, providing competition for quality people, leaving the police with the candidates that couldn’t find a different job during a historically low unemployment period.
I’m not sure what the disconnect is here. Are you trying to say that by lowering pay and benefits, there are going to be higher quality applicants? You are saying that the bad cops are only attracted to the pay, and that good cops would be willing to take a pittance?
What you’re describing is frequently called pension-padding and has nothing to do with mandatory overtime you worked before your final year. I don’t know if I would have done any differently, especially considering how widespread the practice of pension padding is but what happens is that you pay into the pension system for that inflated amount for one year and collect from the pension fund for the rest of your life and it makes the pension fund less solvent and the taxpayers have to step in and shore up the fun that is paying out more than it was intended to pay out.
I’m trying to say exactly what I said to begin with - that no one knows how changing the NYPD’s pension plan will change the applicant pool. It might not change at all ( because remember, even a pension you collect at 55 or after 30 years is better than what most jobs provide), it might be lower quality, it might be smaller but higher quality if the lower quality candidates self-select out. There is no way to tell without changing the pension and seeing what happens.
I was responding to someone who said that “They are in place because the leadership and or the HR leadership determined that this was the package was necessary to get ‘X’ quality of worker to stay ‘Y’ quantity of years.” That may have happened 40 or 50 years ago, but it absolutely has not been revisited since then.
You are correct that no one “knows” how it will work out exactly, but ISTM that if you reduce benefits, you are going to have fewer and lower quality applicants. That is the case in every other profession, but policing may be different, for reasons.
No, policing isn’t different , it can happen in any job. People generally compare potential jobs to the other jobs available to them at the time. Anyone who was hired more than four years before I was had a better pension deal than I do. The total package was still a better deal for me than any other job available.
With the economy rebounding over the last 8 years, and finally getting into where people are back to near where they were before the crash, cop jobs are looking less cushy. It used to be one of the highest paying jobs you could get without a college degree.
Now it doesn’t pay as much, relative to other options, and does require a college degree often times. In order to attract higher quality candidates, the compensation should be greater. I don’t want the cops on patrol in my neighborhood to only be there because no one else would hire them. I want cops that have good training, good pay, and good benefits to look forward to. I don’t want cops worried about money, they take bribes.
No it doesn’t.
First of all, the public employee can take as much overtime as he can his last 3 years (he could take it at any time during his/her career, but the last 3 years is when his/her base salary will be highest).
I only did it my last year as I didn’t want to spend 3 years working & sleeping and nothing else.
My base hourly pay was 37.50/hour. It never, ever would have gone up from that. That was the max out for me no matter what. That equates to $78,000 per year.
My last year I took 12 hour shifts and extra shifts maxing out the allowable over time of 1240 hours/year. 1240 X 56.25= $69750. $69750+$78000=147750.
Because of mandatory and voluntary overtime my previous 2 years earned me more than $78000, but for sake of argument let’s say I made base. Most of you are ignorant of the fact that many public employees get boned with mandatory OT and there is nothing they can do about it.
$78000+$78000+147750= 303750. the average is 101250. 2 1/2% of 101250 is 2531.25, multiplied by 25 is 63281.25 which is pretty close to what my pension actually is, give or take just a few bucks.
In other words, making the pension an average of 3 years does not make it prohibitive for the employee to “pad it”, to quote some vulgar terminology used in this thread.
There seems to be an attitude here that a public employee should get fucked out of an additional pension amount because they worked overtime. If you want to push for a law limiting overtime, especially mandatory overtime, fine. But be warned it will result in agencies having to hire more employees which will increase the burden to tax payers not reduce it. The employee does not create overtime, the employer does. The job needs to get done. How can you blame the employee because the employer has more work to do than employees to do it, necessitating overtime? Think a little bit, would ya?
When Wisconsins Act 10 went through I posted that it doesn’t bother me a bit to pay towards my pension and health care. But these boards were full of venom in defense of the “poor public employees”. Now it seems we’re the enemy after working 25 years or more and sacrificing time with our families for overtime.
The OP needs to understand that the reason Illinois budget is completely ass invaded is because of decades of Democratic control of the legislatures, not retired public employees.
There is also the tendency to view “public employees” as some monolithic group. Well, as someone who had “been there” I can assure you that any major abuses of the system are committed by managerial/political types rather than the rank and file.
They’re the ones, after all, who make the rules.
I am on your side on the pension part. You earned it, you get it. I don’t know that I would call “padding” a vulgar term, it’s just a term. You were acting with the intent of increasing your hours, that’s padding, and there’s nothing wrong with that. (Padding can be bad if you are doing it to hide illegal funds or embezzle legal ones, but the word itself is pretty neutral.)
The one thing that I am concerned about is that amount of overtime. I did not realize that police worked 64 hours a week on 12 hour shifts. We do need to hire more police and cut that overtime down, while maybe still paying them the same amount. There are not many people that can work that many hours in a week and be at 100% or even close to 100% all the time, and we need our cops to be at 100% all of the time, their jobs are important, and the poor judgment that can be caused by being overworked can cost lives.
It’s been mentioned that most pensions pay X% per year of seniority, that is, per year worked. Some plans tie the X to the age at which you begin drawing your pension. I could have retired at 55, but I would have received a smaller percentage for each year I had worked. For my plan, the percentage hits its maximum at 63 years.
Police and Fire Department employees can usually retire earlier, partly because they are physically demanding jobs. I think in our city it’s three years earlier (52) and the percentages are also a bit shifted. I don’t think that’s unreasonable. I also don’t mind a 60 year old fire fighter taking another job after deciding to let the younger guys take the load. There are a lot of jobs that don’t require carrying a hundred pounds up a staircase and I can’t think of any reason to forbid them from taking one of them.
I don’t know the numbers for PD and FD, but a lot of city retirees work for at least another few years in order to qualify for social security. I’m at least 3 quarters short for SS. If I don’t work to bridge that gap, I’ll be losing the credit for the quarters I worked before working for the city.
If you don’t like “padding” with overtime, you’d hate spiking. California made spiking illegal a while back, at the same time that it shifted from using the last year’s salary to using an average of the last three.
You see, there is an employee contribution to CalPERS and there is an employer contribution. Spiking was when, during the last year, the employer would not pay their portion. They would instead pay the employee that amount and let the employee pay both portions directly. That boosted the employee’s salary on paper while not costing the employer anything.
If there are pension plans that still allowed spiking, feel free to be outraged.
This is true. If there is a need for someone to work 64 hours per week every week, the system is broken. Just another example of cops screwing the public. This is bankrupting cities all over the country.
It’s usually not cops who are refusing to hire more cops. It’s usually the city or county.
Broken is broken. Cities are bankrupt, cops are killing and assulting citizens because they are tired from working 60+ hours officially then “working” at Denny’s overnight in their uniform. Corrupt, broken system that screws over the people it should be protecting.
How about staying on topic? You’re using this thread to cop bash. There never is a mod around when you need one!*
It isn’t just LEO’s who are hammered with mandatory overtime. It’s also other public employees right down to the guy who mows the grass in the medium strip of a highway. Should he not get an increased pension because he made more money during his career via overtime?
As for the OP, if I work a full career, retire, and receive a pension, and then start a second career, work that to another retirement, why shouldn’t I receive a second pension? You haven’t shown us any math detailing how it is a detriment to tax payers or somehow a scam. The Op’s entire premise is flawed.
*Did everyone get that joke? 
Based on the original premise, a second career/pension is ok. Artificially padding a pension with OT is bs. Someone shouldn’t get 30-40 years of extra pay beyond what their base is.
30-40 years? WTF are you talking about? 
So when the public employer mandates that the employee work beyond 40 hours a week, you’re saying that pay shouldn’t be used in calculation for his pension?
The employee has to pay extra income taxes to the state and feds, extra social security, and lose his personal time by being mandatoried to OT, but it shouldn’t increase his pension. Why do you feel that way?
You seem to be under a delusion that it’s the employee that creates the overtime. That’s just crazy. In most cases the employee doesn’t want to work extra but has to. One of the compensations to this is an increased pension amount based on the overall salary earned. Why would you oppose that?
It’s not artificially padded. It’s based upon the actual work performed by the individual. Very often, people nearing retirement have to work extra because they are doing their job while training a replacement or writing a manual describing how it all gets done.
OT has to be assigned and approved in every organization I’ve ever heard of. So the manager could say “no” if the person wasn’t actually working. Otherwise, yeah, that’s what they worked.
Many hourly wages are set such that a person can not really live on the money they earn without doing the overtime. It is much cheaper for the company/Gov’t to pay one person OT than to hire and train another and pay another set of benefits. And that person’s retirement would cost the pension plan more as well.
Anyway, it all goes back to the living wage argument. If people were earning a decent salary, and the company were paying now for benefit received, then these pension schemes wouldn’t have to exist. As long as companies/Gov’t use this as a way to defer compensation, some people will work smart and maximize their benefits.
In the defense of some here, “padding” is an known term, and is used as it has been here: A definition to outline the process of artificially increasing one’s retirement.
There are some professions that have a normal work week that is hourly, and usually over 40 hours. I know a few police officers and they have that, as well as some retail workers.
If it’s been normal throughout the life of the government employee to work over 40 hours, I have no issue with that. But if it’s an artificially attempt to increase retirement (i.e. padding), than that is exactly the type of practice that the OP had/has issue with, and erodes public support of the government work force. I have issues with this as well.
And just because there is a supervisor who approves it, that doesn’t make it right. Teaming with fellow employees to work the system makes it no less wrong.