Tennessee Gov. Bill HaslamGov. Bill Haslam quietly scoots away from the nutty ideas of the Legislature’s far right. But he isn’t shy about the legislative agenda he has steadily put in place to favor high-end tax savings for the wealthy – like his own family’s multi-billion-dollar Pilot Oil dynasty – and for business interests generally. Nor is he bashful about cutting state benefits for state employees particularly and working Tennesseans generally.
He already has accomplished his goal of ending state inheritance taxes for the wealthiest residents of our relatively low-income state. Now he’s going after the state’s workers’ compensation plan, and pushing to end guaranteed retirement incomes under the state’s widely appreciated fixed-benefit pension plan for state employees and teachers.
The former, pitched by Haslam as a way to make the state more “business friendly,” clearly would reduce workers’ rights and compensation benefits, even as it adds an estimated 20 government jobs in the state’s labor department’s workers’-compensation division. The pension plan changes – Haslam’s office predictably calls both initiatives meaningful reforms – would close the current fixed-benefit pension plan next year for new employess and shift to a hybrid plan that would provide some guaranteed income coupled with variable 401(k)-based income.
Both initiatives, if passed into law, would become effective July 1, 2014. Both, understandably, are also controversial: They reasonably can be seen as gratuitous changes to relatively solid programs. They would cut rather ordinary benefits to help pay for Haslam’s various other plans to give cash incentives for new businesses, along with generous tax abatements and new tax cuts for business-related income. While similar “reforms” have been made or are underway in other states, there is a commonality in purpose that typically undermines benefits for state workers while expanding favors to businesses.
Workers’ compensation whittled