Portside

Karen Friedman, executive vice president and policy director at the nonprofit Pension Rights Center in Washington, is highly critical of the new law while acknowledging that pension reforms are needed. “We are not saying don’t fix multiemployer [plans],” Friedman said. But an act that allows plans to cut retiree pensions is “such a departure from current law,” she said. “It’s just such a buzz saw on retiree pensions.”

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback wants to make a decades-long bet that pension-fund returns will exceed current interest rates for taxable municipal bonds. “The use of pension bonds impugns an issuer more than a downgrade, because it shows they’re willing to saddle future generations with risk in order to make current budget discussions easier,” says Matt Fabian, a partner at Concord, MA-based research firm Municipal Market Analytics.

Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis specifically said the union is willing to consider reducing benefits for those who still are working, although she emphatically ruled out changes for members who already have retired. But such compromise wont come until the city and the school board agree to contribute more to pensions each year in order to at least partially make up for a contribution shortfall that occurred during much of the past two decades.

Wisconsin was the first state to grant public-sector unions the right to negotiate contracts. Before Gov. Gaylord Nelson signed that law in 1959, only unionized workers in private companies had a government-protected right to bargain collectively. The Wisconsin idea soon spread around the country. Act 10 is an about-face, and Gov. Walker and his Republican supporters see it as a tough-minded strategy that other states can follow. History repeating itself, if in reverse.

With 51 percent of the 24,000 or so local machinists who voted saying yes to the pact, Boeing's " 'best and final' offer [now] guarantees assembly of the next 777 widebody jet and the fabrication of the plane's carbon-fiber wing" will be done at plants in the Puget Sound region.