A newspaper article today covered the subject of pension spiking by the City of Pittsburgh’s firefighters union. Spiking is the practice by which employees can work as much overtime as allowable to boost their final average salary which is then taken as a component of determining the employee’s pension.
The article pointed out that the 2014 Act 47 plan for the City called for an end to pension spiking, as did the Mayor in a letter calling for pension reforms, but that the new bargaining agreement between the City and the union did nothing. The union president pointed to statutory law instead of bargaining, which means that the provision would have to come from a change to the second class city code.
So how many times has the Legislature been informed of the problem? It was part of testimony delivered in 2008 by the former Mayor, and not only was it in the 2014 Act 47 plan but it was also in the 2009 recovery plan, with both plans noting “of the nine unions in Pittsburgh, only the firefighters have overtime included in final salary for purposes of pension benefit calculations”. In the 2009 plan the City was told to eliminate it, in 2014 the City was told to “seek to eliminate it”.
Note that the General Assembly recently amended the second class county code (Allegheny County) to change the determination of final average salary and to limit the amount of overtime for new hires of the County.
