Earlier this week, Connecticut’s US Senator Richard Blumenthal joined several labor leaders and retirement advocates in a press conference celebrating the passage of the Social Security Fairness Act, which removed provisions barring public workers from receiving social security benefits. Blumenthal said that 32,000 Connecticut residents, and 3 million people nationwide, will now receive full social security benefits as a result of the bill’s passage.
The bill aims to remove two elements of social security legislation called the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and the Government Prevention Offset (GPO). WEP reduces the social security earnings of those who have worked less than 30 years at private jobs that pay into social security, on the basis that they will be receiving payment from public pension plans. GPO reduces the spousal benefits payments paid out by social security to surviving spouses who worked public jobs not covered by social security.
“There is no reason that any public service worker should have been denied full benefits simply because they received a pension or some other source of retiree benefit unconnected to Social Security,” said Blumenthal. “We’ve corrected that wrong, long overdue action, and now beginning retroactively for 2024, these social security retirees will begin receiving as much as $600 per individual.”
WEP and GPO have been the target of municipal unions and labor advocates since they were first signed into law by President Reagan in 1983. Blumenthal said these measures constituted a “50 year mistake.” Several speakers spoke of the long history of advocacy their specific organizations have had regarding WEP and GPO.
“Year after year, we would send a group of Connecticut firefighters down to Washington, D.C. to lobby Congress, and this was always the top of our priority list,” said Peter Brown, President of the Uniformed Professional Firefighters Association of CT. “We were never able to get it across until this year.”
Mary Morninger-Elia, an organizer for AFT CT, who has advocated for the bill since 1997, said that it has been “introduced for about 40 years,” and said that this is the first time she could recall it getting called to the floor for a vote. Since then, she has worked in numerous advocacy groups in addition to AFT CT, such as the AFL-CIO, and various retiree and teachers’ groups, all of which she said played an important part in fighting for the bill’s passage.
“A lot of them believed this wasn’t going to happen,” said Morninger-Elia. “I mean I’ve been working on this for a long time, and a lot of time when we would talk about it at meetings people would say, ‘Well, OK yeah right, but it’s not going to happen.’”
Morninger-Elia said the issue became personal for her when she was denied her full benefits upon retirement, and became even worse after she was denied spousal benefits upon the death of her husband.
“Though he had paid into social security for over 40 years, his wife got nothing,” said Morninger-Elia. “All of the money he had put into social security was now going to pay other people’s spouses for their survivor benefits, but his spouse got nothing. That just seemed like more than I could stand.”
Kate Dias, President of the Connecticut Education Association, shared a similar story. Dias, who has worked as a teacher, said the issue became personal to her after she and her husband decided to dig into what impact WEP-GPO would have on their own finances.
“When we started to explore what the impact was on ourselves and to really understand sort of the absolute punitive nature of this, really singling out public servants at the municipal level and saying you’re not entitled to what you’ve put into the system,” said Dias. “When we started to understand that, this was really the difference between being able to retire and not for our second career educators.”
Both Dias and Joselyn DeLancey, Vice President of CEA, said that they hope the passage of the bill will provide another incentive to recruit future teachers, as they will not have to worry about losing their benefits going forward. Other speakers, such as Bette Marrafino, President of the Connecticut Alliance of Retired Americans, also cited the bill’s passage as a win for grassroots advocacy, and as an example of bipartisan cooperation.
The bill passed the House in November, with a vote of 327-75, and passed the Senate on Dec. 20, with a vote of 76-20. It was presented to President Joe Biden to sign on Dec. 27, which Blumenthal assured would happen in the coming days.
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