Last year, the AFT resolved to vigorously defend defined-pension plans for those who are currently in them and oppose all attempts to convert these plans to defined-contribution or 401(k) types of plans for all public and private employees.

Many public employees, as well as employees of private sector organizations, rely on defined-benefit plans that have proven highly efficient and successful, but there has been widespread pressure in recent years to dismantle these plans and replace them with private accounts.

The coalition will educate others by promoting policies and legislation that support defined-benefit pensions. The core message: Defined-benefit plans are stable and dependable, and defined-contribution plans are risky and costly.

Workers need to know that defined-benefit plans provide them with guaranteed benefits for life, no matter what happens to the economy or the stock market, says John Abraham, deputy director of the AFT research and information services department. This is not true with defined-contribution or 401(k)-type plans.

“Private accounts or 401(k) plans are not guaranteed and are subject to the vagaries of the economy and the stock market,” explains Abraham.

State lawmakers and employers need to understand the advantages and disadvantages of each plan, because these pluses and minuses can affect employee hiring and retention, Abraham says. Public employees often exchange higher salaries for good retirement benefits, he adds.

“If states break the commitment of lifetime guarantees in the form of benefits, they should not be surprised to see a great amount of turnover among their public employees,” says Abraham. “States want a committed, stable workforce; offering defined-benefit pensions is a key ingredient to that stability.”

The other founding members of the National Public Pension Coalition are the AFL-CIO; the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; Change to Win; the National Education Association; and the Service Employees International Union.

For more than 25 years, Aaronson has been working to prepare UFT members for a financially secure retirement.

“One of the most important sources of our income [in retirement] is the Social Security system,” says Aaronson.

The general rule of thumb is that retirees need 80 percent of their preretirement income to maintain their standard of living, he says. For UFT retirees, Social Security provides about 50 percent of a paraprofessional’s preretirement income and about 25 percent of the preretirement income for a higher-salaried teacher.

Aaronson, who was one of 83 new NASI members announced in December, says admission to the academy is “quite an honor.”

But Aaronson’s long record of advocacy speaks for itself. For more than two decades he has participated in national, state and local debates on Social Security, Medicare and other social insurance issues; and since 1980 he’s been a trustee of the New York City Teachers’ Retirement System—a defined-benefit pension system.

In the Social Security privatization debate, which really started in the early 1980s, he notes, there is more at stake than retirement security.

The Social Security system, he says, protects every working person (with the exception of some public employees in nonparticipating states) by providing disability benefits or survivor benefits to that worker’s spouse and children.

“Social Security and defined-benefit pensions are an important aspect of defending the middle class in America,” says Aaronson. Even if AFT members are not participating in Social Security, they should be involved in the battle to protect and preserve it, he says, “so that their family members who are not teachers and who are not covered by a defined-benefit pension have at least a baseline of secure retirement income as provided by Social Security.”