Democrats and Republicans agree: working class people must pay for the crisis that Wall Street created. In a recent opinion piece written by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, he outlined a plan to slash public employee pensions. Schwarzenegger wants employees to pay more of their hard earned income to fund their own retirement. Plus, he wants to end the increased payouts that workers earn when they work overtime or don’t use all their vacation time in their last year of employment.
Carlos Alvarez, Peace and Freedom candidate for governor, strongly opposes Schwarzenegger’s plan. Alvarez believes that all public employees should receive their full pensions, no questions asked. “People have worked hard for decades to be able to retire without fear,” said Alvarez.
He continued, “This is another attempt to undermine public sector unions and attack working families. Hard fought public sector benefits gained from struggle and union representation cannot be scapegoated for California ’s financial ills. The answer is not to take away rights from working people, but to extend union rights to all and ensure a stable and secure retirement for every worker in the state.”
Alvarez views pension benefits as a fundamental right. He calls for not only ensuring the full payment of all pensions, but guaranteeing pensions for all workers and increasing the scope and value of the pension benefits. He would keep the retirement age at 55 as it is today.
The two big-business candidates, Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown, however, both fall on the other side. Both fundamentally agree with Schwarzenegger when it comes to when and how workers should be able to retire.
Republican gubernatorial nominee Meg Whitman would force all public employees into 401(k) plans, even though the average 401(k) plan has decreased 20 percent in value since 2007. Such private stock plans benefit employers, not workers. In them, money earned from working is invested in stock and money market investments and is not guaranteed. It is much cheaper for employers to have employees gamble their pensions in the stock market then to provide workers with a comfortable retirement.
Under Whitman’s plan, workers are susceptible to having their retirements stolen from them by corporate criminals, much like what happened during the Enron meltdown in 2001. Whitman also wants to raise the retirement age to all state workers to 65 from the current retirement age of 55.
Posing as the candidate for the working class, Democratic nominee Jerry Brown wants to raise the retirement age for public employees to 60, not 65 as Whitman proposes, as a bone to throw to organized labor. But Brown agrees with Schwarzenegger’s plan. Brown wants to slash public pensions for workers’ last year of employment. He agrees with Schwarzenegger that public employees should pay more of their income into their own retirements.
When the trillions spent on unjustified wars abroad and bailing out banks are taken into consideration, there is no reason why the retirement age for any worker should be raised at all. Knowing that some private sector workers may wonder why public sector workers have benefits they don’t have, the big business politicians are attempting to divide workers’ allegiances and force them to take more concessions. The Alvarez campaign stands against all attacks on working people.
What Schwarzenegger, Whitman, and Brown really represent are the interests of the capitalist class—the class that pours tens of millions into their campaigns. Their system, capitalism, prioritizes profit over people. The attempts by Schwarzenegger and others to raid public pensions are inevitable under the capitalist system, where corporate profits must increase and public services are under constant attack. While CEOs prosper and sit on their so-called “earnings,” millions of Californians toil without jobs.
There is only one answer: fight back! The Carlos Alvarez campaign demands that people’s needs must come first. Alvarez is a socialist. He is fighting in the interests of the working class and against the big business politicians.
Visit www.peaceandfreedom.org and www.votePSL.org and join the campaign! Vote Carlos Alvarez for governor of California this November! Vote Peace and Freedom in 2010!
