This weekend you may have seen the misleading New York Times article on Oregon’s pension system. It’s a narrow, one-sided look at the story from a reporter who, unfortunately, has a history of writing unhelpful articles on state pension systems.

It’s a tired narrative that we’ve seen pop up so many times: focusing on one-in-a-million big dollar PERS payouts like Mike Belloti, while ignoring people like Barbara Walsh. Tens of thousands of regular Oregon families have earned a good retirement through a career in public services jobs.

We know that retirement benefits are essential in helping recruit and retain qualified staff. Public employee salaries are 22% less than their counterparts in the private sector. Benefits help reduce that wage gap and are essential to making sure that Oregon has qualified people doing critical public jobs.

We can’t talk about PERS without talking about—and to—the people who show up every day and work to make Oregon a better place to live.  Moreover, we can’t talk about service cuts without talking about tax loopholes for big corporations. The Times reporter completely ignored this critical part of the story. The corporate share of funding public services has fallen from 18.5 percent in the mid-1970s to 6.7 percent today. Oregon’s corporate lobbyists are distorting the issue and pitting local governments against their employees while they run away with our state’s public service dollars.

And, on top of Oregon’s already rock-bottom corporate tax rate, big business has just gotten another windfall by winning the big federal tax cuts that they lobbied for. At the time, they claimed they’d invest in their employees; now they are keeping the money for themselves and funneling it to shareholders. At the end of the day, they will add $1.5 trillion dollars to the national deficit.  

Our union has successfully pushed back more than 40 pieces of legislation aimed at cutting public employee retirement benefits over the last two years. There are fixes that need to happen — for example we fixed the “side money” issue highlighted in the article — but changes can’t happen without actual public workers at the table. After all, a deal’s a deal.

History has taught us that when public opinion turns against big corporations, corporations will do everything they can to throw public workers and our hard-won benefits under the bus. We saw it in the 2007 financial crisis, and we’re seeing it happen again now.