13 Unions to Sue New Jersey Over Reduced Pension Payments

A judge ruled late last month that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie acted outside the law when he cut state pension contributions by around $2 billion through FY 2015.

But the state will appeal the decision, and the full payments weren’t included in Christie’s recent budget proposal.

As a result, more than a dozen unions said this week that they will sue the state to force it to make its full contributions to the pension system.

From NJ.com:

More than a dozen unions today announced they plan to sue Gov. Chris Christie to force him to increase next year’s payment into the public worker pension system.

[…]

This lawsuit could be expected to mirror a suit filed last summer and decided just last week that argued those payments were contractually protected and Christie broke the law he signed when he slashed them.

“This governor’s continuing disregard for his own pension funding law leaves us no choice but to go back to court to resume this fight in court on behalf of hundreds of thousands of public-sector workers who make their full pension contributions and depend on the modest income they earn in retirement,” New Jersey State AFL-CIO President Charles Wowkanech said in a statement.

Christie would have to find an additional $1.7 billion in his $33.8 billion proposed budget to make the full $3 billion pension payment unions are demanding.

The lawsuit will specifically call for the state to make the full pension payment in 2015.

The state cut its 2014 payment as well, but successfully argued that the cut was the result of a fiscal emergency, and was therefore legal.

Photo By Walter Burns [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons