A message from PEF Retirees President Jim Carr
Time to protect what we’ve earned
As
PEF retirees, we are senior citizens who have worked all our lives for
the people of New York state. We built and repaired roads and bridges. We helped working-class New Yorkers with unemployment claims, while helping them find jobs. We worked in prisons and mental health facilities doing many dangerous and stressful jobs that most people would not or could not do.
We worked hard during our careers in state service, providing services to New Yorkers with a promise and expectation of a secure retirement, a retirement in which we can comfortably live out our remaining years in dignity.
We are parents, grandparents, taxpayers and voters who contribute much to the economies of our communities and state.
Many of us were leaders in our union, and as retirees still continue to volunteer in our communities, retiree chapters, civic groups, labor councils, churches and synagogues. These are just a few of the ways we give back.
We have earned and deserve the respect of the citizens of New York, whom we have served faithfully.
Sometimes, it seems many Americans have forgotten their history and why our society needs unions.
Unions built the middle class, and it is because of unions we are able to retire with a pension. With the decrease in unions, and union density across America, we are experiencing the downsizing of our middle class.
Today, we see the social safety net of Medicare, passed under President Lyndon B. Johnson’s leadership, and Social Security from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, coming under attack in Congress.
When Americans forget our history and fail to learn from our past, we are destined to return to the hard and deplorable times before Social Security and Medicare. Why would we ever want to return to a time before unions were able to create a middle class and workers had few or no rights, no workplace safety, and no pensions of any kind?
Thank god for what we in labor have done and what we all have because of it.
What a crime it would be to allow everything that we and all those generations of workers sacrificed to achieve to be torn from our grasp now by the same greedy interests who have always tried to exploit and dominate us.
As wise Americans have noted, the price of freedom (economic as well as political) is eternal vigilance and struggle.
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