By Pamela M. Prah, Stateline Staff Writer, Stateline, a Pew Center for the States Project

iStockphoto

Like many retirees, Crystal Ward of Lewiston, Maine, worries whether her pension from working as a teacher for 34 years will be enough for her to live on. But unlike most retirees in the country, Ward, 60, can’t bank on Social Security.

Ward is among an estimated 6 million public sector workers whose jobs aren’t covered by Social Security. For many of them, a pension paid by their state or local government employer is all they have to live on.

Ward gets a pension check from the state of about $2,500 per month, although she notes that $300 of that goes straight to health insurance. "Most people believe we get both a state pension and Social Security," Ward says. "But teachers in Maine don’t."

In states across the country — most notably Wisconsin, Ohio and Florida — fights are breaking out over how generous public pension benefits should be and who should pay them. But the debate in Maine is a little different. The math behind any big change in pension rules doesn’t look the same when state employees and teachers sit outside the Social Security system.

Since 2009, Maine has exploring whether and how to get those workers covered. It was one of the ideas considered by a state task force formed by the Legislature to study different ideas for reforming the state pension system. Steven Crouse, a member of that task force who heads up government relations at the Maine Education Association, a teachers’ union, says the Social Security proposal is "a viable option," although he has a number of concerns with it.

Not an easy question

When Social Security went into effect in the 1930s, state and local employees were expressly excluded. That’s because there were constitutional questions about whether the federal government could impose the Social Security payroll tax on state governments. This changed in the 1950s, when a federal law allowed states to get coverage for public employees if they wanted to.

To this day, all states have some public sector workers who don’t participate in Social Security. But coverage varies widely. In Vermont, some 98 percent of state and local public employees are covered by Social Security, according to a 2010 report from the US Government Accountability Office. Meanwhile, just 3 percent are covered in Ohio.

Pages: 1 · 2

More Articles

• A New Lawsuit and Partial Shutdown: Alleging that the Federal Government is Violating the Law by Requiring Some Federal Employees to Work Without Pay
• A Former Secretary's Lament: What is the World's Most Undervalued Profession?
• Jo Freeman Writes An open letter to Donald Trump about the Women’s March on Washington
• Liz Shuler, AFL-CIO's Secretary-Treasurer: Women and Work
• Rekindling Their Power: The Comeback Governors of California, Iowa and Oregon
• Outsourcing the Local Library Can Lead to a Loud Backlash
• States Advance Abortion Legislation and An Analysis of the Politics At Work
• FactCheck.org Examines 'Are Federal Workers Overpaid?'