A win forty years in the making, NEA secures full retirement benefits for educators
By: Amanda Litvinov
Published: December 21, 2024
From NEA.ORG
In an astonishing accomplishment, NEA and NEA-Retired members have helped restore retirement benefits for millions of educators.
How will the repeal of GPO/WEP change your life?
For decades, the government greatly reduced or eliminated educator’s Social Security benefits. Now that the Government Pension Offset and Windfall Elimination Provision have been repealed, retirees will get their full retirement benefits.
Let us know what this means for you.
For more than 40 years, public employees in many states have been subject to punitive and discriminatory measures that reduce their Social Security benefits.
Called the Government Pension Offset (GPO) and Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP), these rules have robbed firefighters, postal workers, police officers, and educators of the retirement income they earned since 1977 and 1983 respectively.
But on December 21—after decades of unflinching advocacy by NEA and allies—Congress voted to fully repeal these damaging provisions. The bill is now headed to President Joe Biden, who is expected to sign it into law in the coming days.
“Together, working through our union, we ended a terrible injustice,” says Susan Strader, a retired technology teacher from Connecticut.
Real-life impact
When Strader retired in June 2024, she knew her financial situation wasn’t as secure as she deserved after 36 years in the workforce.
She has zero regrets about her life choices. She spent 12 years working full-time in corporate America and another 12 years raising children. While working as a consultant, she earned a master’s degree and teaching certification, and then spent a rewarding 13 years as a teacher in Connecticut’s Preston Public Schools.
But because she taught in Connecticut, Strader was subject to GPO and WEP. The same was true for millions of educators in 15 states, and other public employees in a total of 26 states.
“When people ask, ‘If you knew earlier that your retirement would be affected like this, would you make different choices?’ I can honestly answer no,” Strader says. “But it is still devastating to see how serving as a public employee negatively affected my finances in retirement.”
Many educators did not know they would be stripped of benefits until they were at the tail end of their careers.
NEA-Retired President Anita Gibson has heard heartbreaking stories from members who felt blindsided, discovering that the benefits they had earned, or those of a spouse, would be decimated by GPO and WEP.
Advocacy Made the Difference
NEA members flew from across the country to meet with their lawmakers and urge them to repeal GPO and WEP in May 2023. Altogether, educators contacted Congress more than 430,000 times to pass the Social Security Fairness Act.
The Social Security Fairness Sct garnered wide bipartisan support, including bill cosponsor Rep. Garret Graves (R-LA), pictured. The bill passed the U.S. House 327 to 75.
NEA President Becky Pringle speaks at a press conference with Social Security Fairness Act co-sponsor Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Virginia) in September 2024 to support a discharge petition. The rare move to force a vote in the U.S. House was the result of relentless grassroots advocacy.
Senator Schumer promised to bring the Social Security Fairness Act up for a vote in the Senate at a rally on December 11, 2024.
Relentless advocacy from educators, including Connecticut Education Association President Kate Dias, CEA Vice President Joslyn Delancey, and Louisiana Association of Educators Dr. Tia T. Mill. They braved the rain with NEA Vice President Princess Moss for a rally at the U.S. Capitol in December 2024.
NEA Vice President Princess Moss at a rally to repeal GPO and WEP in December 2024
NEA members flew from across the country to meet with their lawmakers and urge them to repeal GPO and WEP in May 2023. Altogether, educators contacted Congress more than 430,000 times to pass the Social Security Fairness Act. Pictured: Representative John Larson (D-CT) meets with Connecticut Education Association former President Kate Dias.
Patrick G. Ryan
“Some retiring educators thought they had planned and saved and done the right things to have retirement security, only to have to keep working into their 70s or move in with family when they can’t afford to stay in their homes,” Gibson says.
“That’s why we have been relentless on this issue,” she adds, noting the hard work of NEA and NEA-Retired members.
"We have been been relentless on this issue," says Anita Gibson, NEA Retired President.
NEA has lobbied federal lawmakers on the issue since the 1990s. In that time, members have traveled to Washington, D.C., met with representatives back home, made calls, sent emails and postcards, and explained the issue to lawmakers, colleagues, and friends.
Where GPO and WEP hurt educators
Educators were affected if they worked in one of the 15 states.
However, there are educators and former educators in all 50 states who have worked in GPO/WEP states and were affected by these unfair provisions, even after they moved to non-GPO/WEP states.
83% of those penalized by GPO were women.
9 in 10educators who worked in an affected state and whose spouses earned Social Security lost benefits because of GPO.
50%WEP reduced up to half of the Social Security benefits that educators in affected states earned in jobs where they did pay Social Security taxes.
What are GPO and WEP?
For far too long, many elected leaders were not well-informed about how these unfair provisions hurt millions of public employees across the nation. Fortunately, educators stepped in with the facts:
More than 2.8 million public sector employees in 26 states were impacted by GPO and WEP. Educators were affected in 15 of those states (see map), because they pay into their state pension system, but not into Social Security.
WEP assumed that none of these public employees earn Social Security benefits—which failed to take into account that many educators hold second jobs and summer gigs that require them to pay Social Security taxes. The provision was often devastating to career-changers like Strader, who did not receive the full benefit of the years they did pay into Social Security. Also, because she did not spend her entire career as a public employee, Strader earned just 16.9 percent of a full teacher pension, which takes over 35 years to secure in Connecticut.
GPO reduced spousal or survivor benefits. More than 70 percent of those affected by GPO lost their entire spousal or survivor benefit.
Some widowed educators received that survivor’s benefit while they were still working. But the minute they retired and started receiving pension payments, they no longer received the benefit that their loved one earned.
Bringing home a win
The best way to help lawmakers understand the problems with GPO and WEP has been to share the stories of our members.
“Without question, the work that our members have done on this issue and the willingness of NEA-Retired members to share their stories led to this victory,” says Marc Egan, director of NEA’s government relations department.
NEA members kept a spotlight on this critical issue, and amped up their activism in the last few years. Since the start of 2023, NEA members had hundreds of face-to-face conversations with lawmakers and rallied on Capitol Hill. In 2024 alone, members made hundreds of thousands of calls to encourage their members of Congress to support the Social Security Fairness Act.
This historic repeal of GPO and WEP will benefit the profession indefinitely, says Anita Gibson: “Our years of advocacy have finally fixed this, not only for our current retirees, but for future generations of educators.”
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