Ha! Yes, I'll grant you that public employees benefit from other employees who don't vest.
Well played, JLee.
Yeah it's not funny to the people who get cut. One of my distant family members bounced around between multiple public schools and is now in their 50's with low income, poor income prospects, and I'm not sure any vesting from any of the school pension programs. It gets even worse though: many government pensions opt their employees out of Social Security!
So not only does the pension take money from every which direction it's able to, if the employees actually want to be mobile, able to switch jobs, etc. they never vest. Unlike a 401k, they can't roll the money over to an IRA and take it with them. Since the government pension opted them out of Social Security, they don't even have that to fall back on. They're totally screwed, all because a few greedy people wanted to find a way to milk the pensions to their own personal benefit.
At the very
least we need to change the law and not permit ANY worker to opt out of Social Security. The current system is a failure because once opted out, if that employee doesn't vest for whatever reason (such as a person who moves several times in their life, health condition requiring unpaid time off and thus officially out of a job, divorce from a violent spouse requiring an immediate move) they are just SOL. Nobody should ever be allowed to be exempted from Social Security. It's the one fallback retirement program that actually has mathematical hope of being reasonably solvent if we make just a few changes to improve funding.
Pensions are basically a pyramid scheme where a huge amount of money comes in, but it only gets paid out to the small number of people who make it to the top. Social Security has the opposite payout model, where the more you pay in, the less you get out of it, as a percentage. The funding is 90% of income up to $826/month, 32% up to $4980/month, and just 15% of your income per month above $4980 until you hit the cap where they stop collecting and benefits do not accrue at all. That progressive system where the people who are low income get the greatest percentage benefit is the key to the SS OAB's success over all these years. Well, that and the fact that unless you're a government worker, you can't choose not to pay in to SS, the way you can choose not to pay into IRAs and 401ks. Mandatory payment into SS I guess is the absolute key to its solvency.