Your jobs exist only to serve the educators of Ohio

STRS Ohio Watchdog Suzanne Laird addressed the STRS Ohio Board during Public Participation on April 17, 2025.

Good Morning:

My initial remarks are directed to the employees of this institution — those who need only work 30 years and retire WITH a COLA. If you are listening, in your comfy offices, please turn up the volume.

Your jobs exist only to serve the educators of Ohio. The same educators who are working longer for less; the retirees who are desperately scrambling without a COLA. Your yearly raises should match, but never exceed, our COLA. Last year, you got generous raises, we got zero. Zero.

I notice we paid CBIZ to conduct a study, not about how the lack of a COLA is affecting our most worthy and vulnerable retirees (a proper and pertinent topic), but about how these poor employees are so underpaid!

I reject the premise. Any study should not include data comparing pension to private sector jobs. If you want to work in the private sector, go. And likewise, any talk of PBIs awarded to pension system employees is totally inappropriate when benefits have yet to be restored. Other Ohio pension systems manage to pay benefits without these extravagant bonuses on top of overweight salaries.

Now, members of my Board. I can already hear the excuses, see you squirming in your seats. “But we can’t vote zero raises for the employees!” Yes, yes you can. But if you feel more comfortable, here’s a radical proposition: remember last December’s supplemental check, how it attempted to alleviate the suffering of the oldest, most neglected retirees? Why not design a comparable system of raises? Let the least among them receive the most. The people in this building who scrub the toilets, serve your free and reduced lunches, — why not give them the 3% we were promised? And so on, right up the pay scale, 2%, then 1%…….. if you earn more than $200,000., a raise of zero will not hurt you the way it hurts a retiree, living on less than $50,000.

Or, you could gather your courage and your fiduciary duty, and vote no. No raises, no bonuses.