Op-ed: Mayor's call for "reform" rings hollow.

LAST SUNDAY, the Inquirer printed an excerpt from the "Betrayal of the American Dream" by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele that detailed the ongoing attacks against defined-benefit retirement plans and the push to replace them with risky and far-less-secure 401(k) plans.

Calling this movement "reform," many employers, including elected governmental employers, have been creating two separate systems of retirees. One class of retirees, the rich, will have everything they need and much more, while a second class of retirees - the vast majority of American workers - will have the crumbs and leftovers of a shredded social safety net to help them in their twilight years.

Many elected public employers have seized on this false "reform" language to mount the assault against negotiated defined-benefit pension plans for public-sector workers in order to dodge contractual obligations and to keep promoting the myth - or lie, if you will - that keeps getting them elected. That myth is one in which elected officials and candidates tell voters they can have all of the services they want, without having to pay any more in taxes.

At the municipal level, it has been my experience that some Democratic and Republican candidates and elected officials have been guilty of promoting this myth - and it continues with the current mayor, who is using the collective-bargaining and arbitration processes to undercut both the health and pension benefits of all city workers.

I found it especially ironic that the Barlett and Steele series excerpt ran in the very same section as a letter to the editor from City Solicitor Shelley Smith, talking on behalf of the mayor's bargaining strategy, claiming he was not "kicking the can down the road" but was instead "drawing a line in the sand in support of vitally needed reforms."

As city solicitor, Smith has a fiduciary responsibility to the city administration and the pension fund. She is supposed to offer dispassionate and balanced legal advice, absent any political agenda, to support the pension fund as it is constituted. She is not supposed to be an advocate for radical and destructive changes that would create exactly the kind of pension system that would shift secure pensions to 401(k)s that Barlett and Steele, in their series, note "were never supposed to take the place of pensions."

Smith's duplicity and posturing on behalf of the mayor, who has not attended even one negotiation session with District Council 33 to make the case himself, gives ample proof that Mayor Nutter's calls for "reform" in contract negotiations and arbitrations ring hollow.

After helping the city save or generate more than $500 million in the past four years, funding that has allowed the mayor to balance four consecutive budgets, the least that city workers deserve is to be treated fairly in arbitrations and contract negotiations.

It is past time for Nutter to stop spending so much time selling the taxpayers the myth of "reform" and instead negotiate honest and fair contract settlements with District Councils 33 and 47 and accept the arbitration award for Firefighters Local 22.