Photograph Source: United States Department of Commerce – Public Domain
“There’s a high likelihood that Gina Raimondo will be president someday. The question is president of what?” (Rhode Map, November 8, 2024). For readers not familiar with the name Gina Raimondo, here’s a primer. Raimondo left Wall Street and soon became the general treasurer of Rhode Island. From that office, Raimondo’s career put her in the governor’s office of Rhode Island before moving on to secretary at the Department of Commerce in the Biden administration. Now the prognostications begin about Raimondo’s future since Trump will ascend to a second term in the White House.
Perhaps it’s indelicate to note that I know Raimondo intimately? But that’s a pretty accurate assessment of the effect she had on my household and tens of thousands of other households of retirees and current public sector workers in and outside of Rhode Island. Raimondo was the architect of the so-called 2011 pension reform program in Rhode Island as general treasurer which ended the state’s legal obligation to pay retirees a yearly 3% cost of living adjustment (COLA) in addition to their base pension payments. There were also modifications to the pensions of current state and municipal workers in Rhode Island at the time of the overhaul. Workers at the time of the end of the COLA in force during the massive tectonic shift in Rhode Island public employee pensions faced a changed and a lesser pension program. The pension debacle in Rhode Island became a template for other pension systems across the country whose objective was to change the landscape of defined-benefit pensions. National anti-pension mouthpieces came to Rhode Island to spread the gospel of so-called pension reform across the US. I have no idea what forensic pension investigations would have shown about the strengths or weaknesses of the Rhode Island pension system. Over two decades before the pension debacle there was a pension buyout program that allowed public employees to retire by paying into the system for past work experiences such as summer lifeguard jobs. It’s impossible to make these scenarios up! The latter is a reflection of the ongoing anemic economy in the state that saw a massive number of textile jobs leave during the first half of the 20th century. Rhode Island was also known for its official repression of worker strikes during that same period. Rhode Island was not alone in repression of workers during that era.
“A long time ago, I would have said she can’t go into the business world because that’s a killer for Democrats,” said Don Sweitzer, the former IGT chairman who has long been a top confidant to Raimondo. “Nothing’s a killer anymore.” (Rhode Map)
“Sweitzer, a former finance director and political director for the Democratic National Committee, said Raimondo will have plenty of opportunities in the private sector or potentially as a college president – Harvard will be searching for a new president in 2026 – but he believes she deserves a seat at the table within the party.”
The article goes on to list opportunity after opportunity for Raimondo, but no one cares that she reached into the pockets of tens of thousands of public sector retirees in Rhode Island and left some of them lost at sea without either a life raft or a life jacket. Whether or not Raimondo’s so-called pension reform program “saved” the current pension system in Rhode Island is questionable. The mailings I receive show the pension doing quite well now with lots of assets while retirees who did not see this blindside coming and did not have other sources of income have been generally screwed.
As a last hurrah, I appeared in superior court in Rhode Island along with hundreds of other retirees to argue against the final nail in the coffin being hammered in to stop the pension overhaul. Of course, the pension system was changed with the help of the governor and legislature. It was a done deal and my testimony was laughable, not in its intent, but in its uselessness. The head of the pension review overhaul system, a former Rhode Island supreme court chief justice who I happened to know, sat beside the bar in the jury box where I testified while the done deal unfolded.
I had written about the pension overhaul and some of the union leaders who once said they would oppose an overhaul became somewhat reluctant cheerleaders for the pension changes. In the years since the pension debacle, the state has literally thrown crumbs of a $100 or so here and there to mollify retirees while inflation rages. During the process of passing the pension legislation, I spoke with fellow retirees who sounded the chorus that we couldn’t expect either blood or water from a stone in terms of keeping our once promised COLAs.
That the Biden administration put someone who is clearly a neoliberal as the secretary of the Department of Commerce is no surprise. The anti-union sentiment in the US government extends from the Taft-Hartley Act to the dissing of railroad workers by Biden. International trade depends on low-wage jobs across the globe and that trend will continue. The juggernaut of creating more wealth for giant corporations and individuals has put Trump and his right-wing sycophants on our doorsteps and the domestic and international economic system will go on its merry way with labor and pensions being one of the cogs that Rhode Island successfully dispensed with under Raimondo. The 2011 pension debacle in RI was a bipartisan affair with Gina Raimondo, a Democrat, leading the charge. I expect great opportunities await her.
