Defining Benefits Down

I had an interesting conversation with a friend recently about public employee benefits.  My friend is a judge in California, and has always worked for the government, first as a prosecutor, then a judge.  He has a good health care plan, and has the ability to retire with a nice pension when he is 65.  Naturally, he is opposed to "government" health care.  He also, oddly, shared the public outrage over a San Diego fire chief who retired with a large chunk of her $165,000 salary intact at age 53.  http://www.10news.com/news/19584179/detail.html?ref=patrick.net.  He wasn't opposed to the idea of a public employee receiving 75% of their salary upon retirement, more that the amount was too much and the fire chief too young.  Of course, my friend is also a proponent of "marketplace" cures for all ills, including social security.

Leaving aside the obvious hypocrisy of someone feeding off the public tit opposed to anyone else getting government benefits, this raises an issue I hear about a lot:  why should public employees get better health care and pension benefits than those in the private sector?  The old argument was that public employees make less in salary, and it is made up for with benefits.  That is no longer necessarily the case.  Another argument for public safety employees is that without a retirement option at the end of the road, many officers would leave dangerous jobs after the piss and vinegar of youth evaporated, leaving a gap in qualified stable employees.

The real problem is that we have allowed corporations and the "free market" to dictate the terms of our health care and pensions for too long.  Time was, there was a social contract in place:  work for a company for your entire career, and at the end you would get a decent pension, and health care along the way.  That idea is gone, replaced by the idea of shareholder profits at all costs, even the human costs involved when benefits are slashed or eliminated.  The dirty little secret of health care reform is that many large companies are secretly in favor of shifting the burden of health care from their books to the government.

What is needed now is a shift in thinking about benefits.  Instead of wondering why public sector employees have better benefits than the rest of us, we should be wondering why the rest of us don't have benefits like the public sector.  In ten or twenty years the baby boomers will be retiring, and they will be the first generation since WWII to retire in large numbers without secured defined benefit pension benefits.  How many of us have no idea how we are going to afford retirement, and keep plugging away, joking that we'll never be able to retire?  The joke isn't going to be so funny once we actually have to retire.