Retired and rehired
There are no comments for this page [ Add Comment ]Sunday, January 28, 2007
As high school seniors enter adult life, they could do worse than to get this bit of advice: Get a job on the public payroll.
True, public service for most does not promise riches, though top managers are making more and more money all the time, even surpassing $100,000 per year in city, county and state governments. But the benefits for all are plain to see, especially when it comes to employment with the state.
Most significantly, local, county and state public-safety employees -- all of whom are overseen by the state when it comes to retirements -- can work for 20 years and then retire. And other state employees can retire after 25 or 30 years on the job.
In the public safety realm, if you play your cards right, that means retirement in your mid-40s, then it's on to a second career. In other fields, you could retire in your late-40s to mid-50s and launch the second act of your working life.
Or you could do as more and more state employees are doing: retire and come back to the same -- or similar -- job. It's sweet, drawing that retirement check and a full-time paycheck at the same time.
But a segment of the taxpaying public looks askance at that sort of bureaucratic manipulation. "Double-dipping," some critics call it. And they have a point.
Rep. Glenn Donnelson, R-North Ogden, is again sponsoring legislation that would extend the cooling-off period between retirement and rehiring to the same state jobs from six months to one year. It's good, as far as it goes, but we're of two minds when it comes to early retirement for state workers.
Rank-and-file law enforcement, corrections officers and firefighters -- the ground-pounders, if you will, of the city, county and state systems -- should be able to maintain that 20-year work window before they qualify for retirement. It's wise to have fresh, or fresher, legs and backs for working on the streets, in jails or prisons.
But 25 or 30 years for other employees? Private-sector workers punch the clock until they've reached 65 or 70, or have otherwise managed their savings and investments into sustainable retirement accounts. Why not public employees?
Maybe they deserve an early out. That's one argument to be made.
But another would be that the state, relieved of burdensome early retirement costs for employees who work 30 years and are gone, would have extra money to pay employees -- teachers, accountants, maintenance workers and the rest -- currently on the job, rather than funding retirement wages plus a full salary to that same retired individual who now has taken work with the same or similar department of state government.
It's all well and fine to play with six-month and 12-month cooling-off periods, but it hardly addresses the issue of "retirement": Retirement used to mean you don't do that job anymore. If you return to doing it, or working for the same employer -- in this case, the state -- maybe those retirement earnings should be suspended.
At least we should be talking about it, and how it's affecting funding for overall state government.
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