School Retirement For Kansas

A Report by R. V. Phinney, Superintendent of Schools, Larned, Kansas

THE AMERICAN RETIREMENT PROGRAM

Te federal government has recently adopted a national policy of
providing old-age annuities for all wage earners on a business basis,
and many of the states have already applied this policy so that two-
thirds of the public school teachers and some 80 to 90 per cent of all
the wage earners of the nation are under some form of retirement
plan. The earlier teacher retirement laws date back to 1908. Retire-
ment has long been an established procedure in the post office and
throughout the federal civil service; also with the railroads, other
corporations, and with the churches, etc. In 1935 the National Social
Security Act organized and systematized this movement under govern-
ment management, and vastly extended it. This law announced old-
age benefits based on “any service, of whatever nature, performed
within the United States by an employee for his employer.” The gov-
ernment then proceeded to provide for this protection for clerks, jani-
tors, barbers, bank cashiers, factory workers, typists, laundry women,
Hollywood actors, Mexican section hands, Chinese in the salmon can-
neries, non-naturalized Polacks in the steel mills, Japanese employees
in Hawaii, auto mechanics, supreme court justices, Pullman porters,
floor walkers, southern mill hands, lumber jacks, corporation execu-
tives, saloon bar tenders, etc.

Having planned this gigantic and revolutionary program, the fed-
eral government did a strange thing: it picked out three minor groups
of wage earners, who are not otherwise protected, and declared them
to be ineligible to participate like other wage earners. These three
groups are farm hands, hired girls in the homes, and the teachers and
other employees of the states and their subdivisions.

For the teachers and other state employees there is a legal techni-
cality which the Congress did not bother to avoid. The federal retire-
ment program is financed by payroll taxes. Under our federal system
state pay rolls are not subject to national taxation. So for redress, the
school people must apply to the state legislature. Half the states have
already taken care of their school employees. Kansas has not.

The retirement movement is no longer a theory. It did not originate
in the schools, and it was not brought to Kansas by the teachers. The
arguments about retirement are, relatively speaking, accepted. The
methods have been established by American business and the Ameri-
can government. The system is in operation. There are only two main
questions at issue: (1) Are Kansas school employees to get what
wage earners in other lines almost universally get now; or are teach-
ers ineligible to the rights so generally enjoyed by other American
citizens? (2) Will the employing school system of Kansas accept its
responsibilities, as a modern employer of labor, for the welfare of its
school employees, or will it refuse?

This bulletin, then, is devoted to listing the accepted principles and
procedures of modern retirement and to presenting the significant
facts and problems peculiar to the Kansas school situation. Our plan
of campaign is to get the facts before the teachers, the public, and the