Retirement benefits offer U of I staff economic security after finishing a career of helping the university achieve excellence in education, research, and public service. Because it participates in the State Universities Retirement System (SURS), U of I offers good retiree benefits, but there's always room for improvement. By supporting laws that extend benefits, the Illinois Education Association (IEA) already works to ensure that U of I professional staff and others receive the best benefits possible.
It seems like the system should be simple--SURS holds on to a little bit of your check each month, and the university contributes some too; and when you're ready to retire, you get back what you and the university stashed away. But, of course, it's not that simple.
Retirement benefits depend either on a simple formula (you retire with 2.2 percent of your annual pay for each year of service) or a more complex one that takes into account interest rates, individual contributions, and an "age factor."
Many parameters can be tweaked to either enhance or diminish one's benefits, including minimum ages of retirement, penalties for early retirement, years to vestiture, years to vestiture for one's spouse, the amount of the employer contribution, health and survivor benefits, interest rates on retiree accounts, and on and on. Add in the new complexity of three different retirement plans (traditional, self-managed, and portable), and a university employee could earn a graduate degree simply trying to untangle and keep track of the system!
It would be nice if employees had a similar advocate working for their interests. Fortunately IEA, the state-wide affiliate of the Association of Academic Professionals, already has people working to protect and expand employee rights and benefits, including retirement benefits. With one of the best-known and most respected government relations departments in Springfield, IEA's watchful eye ensures that its members' interests are included in the legislative process.
Since IEA's strength is in the unity of its 100,000 members, the state office ensures that members are kept informed about what's happening in the legislature. IEA also encourages members to contact their representatives. If a local association like ours receives a legislative update describing a bill that helps academic professionals, AAP members can call their legislators and encourage them to support the bill. Without IEA, each employee would need to closely follow the legislature's activities and contact legislators on her/his own, a process which is prohibitively time consuming, if not impossible, for most academic professionals. Clearly, we can communicate and promote our needs much more successfully by working together with help from IEA staff than by working in isolation.
Thirty-and-out would allow employees with 30 years of service to retire with full benefits, currently only received after 35 years of service. A temporary 30-and-out law is currently in place, but it only lasts until 2002. The current bills would make the 30-and-out provision permanent. Rich Frankenfeld of the IEA government relations department says that passage of this enhancement will probably not occur unless other state employees receive the "five-plus-five" early retirement package (see AAP Brief #1, December 1998, on our web page). Since Governor Ryan and other influential parties in the state oppose five-plus-five as currently written, neither it nor 30-and-out is likely to pass. Nonetheless, the IEA supports the 30-and-out bills.
The Improved Benefits for Early Retirees bill would give SURS participants an option that could lower medical payments and improve retirement benefits for those who retire with fewer than 20 years of service. As the academic professional workforce becomes more mobile with one-year contracts and "institutional flexibility" plans like the Support Services Strategy (see "Senate," p. 1), this improvement could be important for many of us. The IEA supports these bills.
If you want more information about the state legislature and what it's doing to help or hurt academic professionals, check the IEA web site at www.ieanea.org. Legislative updates and calendars are available there, as is contact information for your representatives.
Because your employment conditions depend on what's happening in Springfield, AAP thinks you should be kept informed.