The overtime thing is the most galling, since it's generally straight-up theft of government resources. There's no legitimate government purpose to the extra hours. The theft is culturally accepted by government employees because it costs more than garden-variety timecard fraud -- you don't just get to steal the marginal hour's pay, you get to steal X0% of that every year for the rest of your life, automatically. And it becomes culture in these institutions -- you cover for others because you expect someone to cover for you once it is your turn.
That's true in some extreme cases, though the more usual case is simply bias in which employees get assigned legitimate overtime, in which case there is a legitimate government purpose in the extra hours, it's just that the cost to the government of those extra hours is unnecessarily maximized.
Though in either case I wouldn't say either form of overtime spi king is the most galling form of spiking.
For example, the spiking that is mentioned in the thread (Vacation cash-outs, overtime, etc.) is not available in the State employee system.
A "last minute" raise has essentially no effect, since even before the recent move to a 36-month base, the pension base was the average of the highest 12 months.
"Spiking" isn't last-minute raises, it's a catch-all name for a wide variety of strategies (some of which are merely reasonable and legitimate tactics given the rules, and some of which are outright frauds on their own which have greater effect when combined with tactical timing with the retirement rules) for maximizing pension base by (under the 12-month rule) maximizing pay in the last 12 months. Among the strategies:
+ Securing a higher-base-pay for just that period (most abusively -- and also most rarely -- a collaboration with higher leadership to give an employee a highly paid position with paper duties to justify the high pay that the employee actually isn't expected to perform.)
+ Maximizing overtime, in positions eligible for overtime pay, during the last 12 months (again, with some notable abuses where the overtime work is work not really necessary to the agency mission or, in more extreme cases, outright fraudulent work-on-paper.)
+ Maximizing any non-base, non-overtime pay that figures into retirement base calculations.
Sounds like classic union cop out to screw over the young / new workers in favor of existing ones.
Government postings are even better.
The UN requires only five years of service before you're eligible for pension benefits, and you can still collect those on top of whatever pension your home country government gives you (which is common), or even while being employed in a different government posting.
It's not 100% of salary if you only stay 5 years, but it's pretty large - you can easily reach eligibility for a pension that's large enough to live on before you're 30, and then "double up" by taking other government postings whose pension eligibility is handled separately.
That's the minimum. It goes up from there depending on your position. Typically, you could expect to make a lot, lot more than that, even for very short tenure: http://www.un.org/Depts/OHRM/salaries_allowances/salary.htm
> which you can start collecting when you're 62 years old
...yes, but the point is that you only need to be employed for five years to be eligible for lifetime benefits. Work there for 5 years in your 20s and you're set.
...so?
This whole thread is in response to the claim that "I doubt there's even one pension plan, public or private, in the U.S., Europe, or Asia which [provides 100% of salary as a pension after working 25 years for eligiblity]".
So, having a pension which provides more than 100% of salary as pension after working only five years for eligibility is very relevant. That's far more generous even than what OP described.
Oh, and that income is tax-exempt in many places, to boot. It's an absurdly lavish benefit.
There are very good reasons that public safety employees get much better pension deals than other public sector employees, and they certainly aren't typical of the field.
> Technically it's 90% of peak salary but "spiking" is culturally accepted, so in practice you can have more than 100% of your final year salary in pension benefits.
Spiking is just strategically maximizing your final year salary; it doesn't increase the ratio of pension to salary. And, spiking in the future has been cut back since for several years new hires in moosr CA public employers (including public safety ones like CHP officers) have average salary of the highest 36 months rather than the highest year as the pension base.
But I'm still genuinely interested in finding an example like koolba mentioned.
[0]http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/06/in-calif...