When last we shone a light on abusive teachers-union fat cats, the focus was a 24-person roast quail feast in a posh Albany restaurant whose management had to call the cops to get the unionists to pay the check.
Today, the porky-pussycat watch yields one Richard Iannuzzi, president of New York State United Teachers — the state’s largest teachers union and the parent organization of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers.
Iannuzzi will pull down roughly $300,000 in salary and benefits this year — up 16 percent since 2008 — and never mind that NYSUT itself is rapidly going broke under his leadership.
NYSUT, in fact, declined during that period from $28 million in positive net assets to more than $117 million in nega tive net assets last year, according to the US Department of Labor.
Iannuzzi’s lush pay hike played only a small part of the dramatic decline — more on which below.
But first let us note NYSUT’s latest caper, a just-produced TV ad making fun of — how ironic — fat cats.
It shows a smarmy Wall Street type, snidely lecturing unseen listeners about the need for “massive budget cuts” as well as “tax breaks and subsidies for the rich and powerful” — which means “sacrifices from people like you.”
The “people like you” turn out to be two little kids, quailing before the Gordon Gekko type — before one of them tells the exec: “You need a time out.”
“Don’t sacrifice their education for tax breaks for millionaires,” pleads the ad.
Now, if there were any positive connection between spending and public-school performance, New York’s kids would be smarter than Watson the Computer.
But they’re not — despite the billions in fresh money poured into the system over the past decade.
It is, in fact, Gov. Cuomo’s effort to gain control of that insane spending that has NYSUT in such a swivet.
Control of the sort NYSUT could use.
According to NYSUT’s own filings with the feds, the union’s total liabilities have skyrocketed on Iannuzzi’s watch — mostly because of sharply higher retiree medical and pension costs.
Consider: NYSUT’s overall medical/pension liabilities went from $59 million in 2007-2008 to $190 million the next year and $214 million in 2009-2010.
As a result, as mentioned above, the union dropped into net-negative-asset territory in 2009.
This, despite a 78 percent jump in membership over the past decade and a 29 percent rise in dues revenue in the past four years alone.
Of course, it’s not just pension costs that have NYSUT running in the red: The union more than doubled its political spending last year, from $4.7 million to $10.4 million. (Albany legislators aren’t that expensive, but when you’re buying so many . . .)
And the amount it doles out to its own directors and employees — dozens of whom earn healthy six-figure salaries — has mushroomed more than 38 percent over the past four years.
That includes Iannuzzi’s take, which went from $257,000 in 2007-2008 to $298,500 the following year — a 16 percent rise.
At least Iannuzzi and his cohorts are consistent: They want Albany to keep spending taxpayer money on their members as lavishly as they spend dues income on themselves.
Maybe NYSUT can afford it — but New York taxpayers no longer can.
Cuomo gets it, even if Iannuzzi doesn’t.