Biggest Threat to Public Unions - CALIFORNIA? Huh?

[GHook93]

In the big liberal cities of San Jose and San Diego, the VOTERS in these cities voted to strip the Public Union workers of there vastly over-paid and under-funded pensions and replace them with individual private sectoresqe 401K. This is vastly more radical then what the Brave Gov Walker did. Walker kept in the pensions, but required the Union members to actually pay some for it. Here the pensions got eliminated and they now have individual non-tax payor funded retirement plans.

Voteres over-welmingly supported this to a tune of 69% in SD and 71% in San Jose!

Note these aren't Republican havens or small cities. A GOP candidate couldn't evern get 10% of the vote in either city. San Diego is the 2nd largest (1.3 mil) and San Jose is the 3rd largest (nearly 1 mil) CA city!
List of largest California cities by population - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

If every State, City and Federal government followed SD and SJ lead there wouldn't be any Pensions left in the country. How fiscally sound would we be!!!

Blog: Big Labor's Other Disaster: California
Voters in San Diego and San Jose, the 8th and tenth biggest municipalities in the United States, decisively voted to redistribute income from the rich (public employees) to the middle class taxpayers who earn far less on average. Both cities have strong Democratic registration majorities, indicating that the general public has fully absorbed the lesson that government jobs are wildly overpaid, and that it is necessary to choose between using money to serve the taxpayers, or using it to benefit the bureaucrats.

Craig Gustafson of the San Diego Union-Tribune describes the measure approved in San Diego with 69 percent of the vote:

A ballot initiative that would replace guaranteed pensions with 401(k)-style plans for most new city hires received overwhelming support Tuesday from San Diego voters who were clearly fed up with the decade-long civic discussion about the city's pension problems.

Proposition B is viewed by supporters - including Mayor Jerry Sanders and City Council members Carl DeMaio and Kevin Faulconer - as pivotal to moving the city past its fiscal woes that stem, in part, from the decision by previous city leaders to twice increase benefits for workers without identifying a way to pay for them.

The woes are substantial:

The city has a nearly $2.2 billion pension deficit as a result of past decisions to increase pension benefits while underfunding the pension plan in 1996 and 2002.

Investment losses exacerbated the problem.

Meanwhile, in San Jose, an astounding 71 percent of voters approved the city's own Proposition B. From the unions' perspective, it is an attack of killer B's, I guess. This plan changes new hires to 401ks like everybody else, and cuts some benefits from existing employees. John Woolfolk of the San Jose Mercury-News reports the disaster for Big Labor as a victory for the mayor: