2018 Is an Election Year, But Watch out for Your IPERS in 2019!

Caption: 1. Hand-made sign seen at an annual Labor Day picnic at City Park, Iowa City (2016?). 2. Jim Conzemius, public employee, getting ready to ride his bicycle to work. Please don't run him over! I'm quite fond of the man. 3. Side view of Jim Conzemius, riding to work.

Michael L. Fitzgerald, Iowa's first-rate state treasurer and IPERS board member, is concerned about IPERS despite its solid financial footing, which is to his credit. He's worried about what Gov. Kim Reynolds and Iowa's legislators might do to IPERS, despite the fact that Iowa's public employees were promised these pensions and 88% of the pensions are spent in Iowa.

Republicans are soft-pedaling what they're going to do to public employees' pensions because 2018 is an election year. So Repubs are tip-toeing around the IPERS issue in the hopes they'll get reelected despite past treachery. They know that public employees are already mad as hell after Republicans said they were going to "tweak" collective bargaining and then gutted collective bargaining. They even carved out unequal exceptions for some public employees in ways that made no sense, and Polk County District Judge Arthur Gamble, for reasons known only to Gamble, upheld the unfairness of those unequal exceptions despite the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees' (AFSCME's) entirely rational argument that the collective bargaining law violates the constitutional amendment of equal protection under the law (Section 1 of Amendment XIV of the Bill of Rights). For example, some Iowa law enforcement officers have collective bargaining rights that other law enforcement officers don't have.

Watch out for 2019 if Republicans get reelected. Better yet, don't wait for 2019. Burn Republicans for what they did to public and private employees in 2017 and vote Democratic. Democrats are pro-labor. They support public employees and workers in general. Gov. Terry Branstad actively opposed them. He was out to get public employees in every way he could, and his clone, pro-business Gov. Kim Reynolds, is no different. She and her fellow Republicans lowered the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour in the five Iowa counties that had raised the minimum wage. Johnson County raised their minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, and 140 Johnson County businesses agreed to continue paying at least $10.10 an hour after the Republican governor and state legislature successfully rolled back all counties' minimum wage to $7.25 an hour. Not everyone is as generous as the Republic of Johnson County.

While hard on the working class, Gov. Reynolds has given away millions of dollars to wealthy corporations like Google and Apple, economic folly proven by Iowa's staggering loss of jobs between 2007 and 2016, which left the state budget unable and unwilling to meet its obligations to constituents to provide adequate public education, access to the judiciary (which I don't care about because justice is inaccessible in Iowa anyway), and other services.

Iowa Democrats running for governor, other than Fred Hubbell, don't come from wealth, although if wealth were a barrier to elected office we never would have had FDR or Theodore Roosevelt. Nate Boulton is a labor attorney and Cathy Glasson is an ICU nurse who is president of her local union, Service Employees International Union. She is pro-labor, pro-union, and a supporter of a $15 minimum wage. Both Nate Boulton and Cathy Glasson come from working-class backgrounds.

IPERS is 81.4% funded, according to the Storm Lake Times. Anything over 80% in a pension fund is considered solid. Gov. Kim Reynolds is emphatic that she won't change IPERS in 2018 but won't commit to keeping it intact the way it is in 2019. That means she hopes to be reelected first with her Republican majority intact in 2018, and then she'll change it. You can count on it. So if you're a public employee or married to one, you'd better vote Democratic to stop the Republicans from "tweaking" your pension.

IPERS pensions don't just benefit retired public employees, they benefit communities, too. Retirees spend their pensions all over Iowa and help keep many small towns alive.

I don't know about your spouse, but mine is a public employee who has -- for now -- an IPERS pension that he and his public employers have been contributing to for 27.5 years. Jim isn't retiring any time soon, but he's 65 years old. He exercises every day and rides his bicycle to work most of the year. He also has good family genes. It'd be nice if his pension lasted as long as he's probably going to.