How a Grassroots Movement with Deep Ties to Maine Won Repeal of Social Security Offset Penalties for Public Workers
PHOTO: IAFF 740 retiree Dick Wurfel and President Biden at the signing for the Social Security Fairness Act on Monday and Senator Collins with Ginette Rivard (MSEA) prior to the bill signing.
In a tremendous victory for public workers and their families, President Joe Biden signed the Social Security Fairness Act of 2023 into law on Monday, January 5, repealing the Reagan-era Social Security Offset formally known as the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and the Government Pension Offset (GPO). Among those attending the signing ceremony at the White House were Dick Wurfel from Windham of IAFF Local 740 and the Professional Firefighters of Maine as well as Ginette Rivard of Caribou of the Maine Service Employees Association (MSEA-SEIU 1989) and Mark Bernard, Jim Durkin and Ed Keefe of AFSCME Council 93.
The WEP, enacted in 1983, reduced Social Security benefits for individuals with a state pension even if they contributed to Social Security in a separate private sector career. The GPO reduced and often eliminated the Social Security benefits for surviving spouses by 100 percent. Maine is one of 15 states where state employees have been unfairly penalized by the GPO and WEP and one of 26 states where county and municipal retirees are affected by the offsets. This included over 21,000 Maine workers penalized by the WEP over 8,000 Mainers penalized by the GPO. Overall, it's estimated that the offsets took $60 billion dollars in Social Security benefits from millions of workers and their spouses.
Penny Whitney-Asdourian (MSEA SEIU 1989), a retiree from Scarborough, worked for over 33 years for the Judicial Branch of Maine State Government. She said she and her husband, a retired firefighter, have been losing $1,000 a month due to the Windfall Elimination Provision.
“While an extra $12,000 a year may not sound like a lot to many people, it certainly is a lot of money to us. It would pay our property taxes, our homeowners’ insurance, and make a huge dent in our heating expenses during the Maine winters,” said Whitney-Asdourian. “For many retirees, especially those who have been retired for many years, getting the Social Security retirement benefits that they paid into can mean the end to food and fuel insecurity.”
Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) were the lead sponsors of the Senate bill and Senator Angus King was a co-sponsor. Rep. Jared Golden and Rep. Chellie Pingree co-sponsored the House version of the bill. Congressman Garrett Graves (R-LA) and Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) were the leaders of the movement in the House.
A Grassroots Movement
The historic signing of the law is the result of years of organizing and lobbying by a grassroots coalition of retired teachers, firefighters, police officers and other public employees as well as deep work from unions, like AFSCME Council 93, to repeal these harmful penalties that impact participants in the Maine Public Employees Retirement System. The repeal represents a very rare show of bipartisanship that may not have happened were it not for the work of thousands of rank and file union workers and retirees all over the country.
Dick Wurfel, a retired Portland firefighter and 47-year member of IAFF Local 740 has been a leader in this fight for decades. He first learned about the Social Security offsets while helping a member with his retirement in 1988 and it soon became his pet issue.
“I tried hundreds of times to catch the ears of Maine labor workers all the way back to former Maine AFL-CIO President Eddie Gorham and the gang at the AFL-CIO, the firefighters, the cops and everyone who was ostensibly affected,” said Wurfel. Early on most of them didn’t know what he was talking about, but once he explained it, he recalled that the general attitude was, “Don’t waste your time. We’ll never get those offsets repealed. It would take an Act of Congress.”
Nevertheless, Wurfel and thousands of other workers kept pushing to repeal the harmful offsets. But it was difficult to get rank-and-file workers involved because politics can be hard to stomach for most people.
“Unfortunately, I ended up just plowing the dooryard by myself for years and years,” said Wurfel.
Then in the early 2000s, the self-described “dyed-in-the-wool Democrat,” found a strong ally in Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins, who championed the first bill to repeal the WEP and GPO in 2003.
As Wurfel explained, “The firefighters had a strong relationship with Susan Collins from very early in her career in the Senate. We were one of her biggest backers and we helped her out with her campaign. She absolutely loves us and we love her.”
In a statement to Maine Labor News, Senator Collins wrote, “In 2003, after meeting numerous Mainers who explained to me the unfairness they faced due to the WEP and the GPO, I convened the first-ever hearing in the United States Senate to educate my colleagues on the financial challenges these two provisions imposed on millions of public-sector retirees, including tens of thousands in Maine. Thanks to the tireless efforts of advocates like retired Portland firefighter Dick Wurfel and hundreds of others from across the state and the nation, we built the bipartisan momentum needed to finally right this wrong. Their dedication over the past two decades was instrumental in achieving this victory."
Unfortunately, the bill failed, but Wurfel continued to work on the issue even after his retirement from the fire department in 2010.
Then around 2018, retired Portland police officer Peter Joyce approached Wurfel with the idea to start a Facebook group for retirees impacted by the offsets. Wurfel was skeptical at first because in his experience “some of the craziest people in the world” join those groups and “basically wreck the place.” But being retired Peter had some time on his hands and launched the group. By 2020, the National WEP & GPO Repeal Movement Facebook group had grown to 1,900 members across the country. That’s when Wurfel accepted his invitation to be an administrator of the group along with retired teacherPam Alexandroff of Chicago, Dianne Windor of Arizona, and Kathy Smith of Ohio.
New members were joining every day to learn about the problem and how to get involved to fix it. After Joyce stepped away from admin duties for personal reasons, the group elected Alexandroff as the lead administrator of the page. Wurfel focused his energy on building a coalition of public employee unions in Maine and across the country to support the WEP/GPO repeal.
“It had not become the kind of formal coalition I had envisioned in my perfectionist mind, but by 2020 we began to feel like a snowball rolling down a ski slope filled with moguls, just bouncing here and there, picking up snow,” said Wurfel.
Meanwhile, Alexandroff was activating thousands of members in the group to get involved. Soon they began organizing offline and holding rallies. In 2022, 300 members of the group — including Wurfel and Whitney-Asdourian, along with MSEA-SEIU 1989 members Lisa Morgan, JB Whipple and Robyn Egan — joined 300 retirees in a rally at the U.S. Capitol to demand a repeal of the WEP and GPO. There wasn’t much of a budget for the event so they relied on a $193 PA system and a $37 folding podium. They invited IAFF President Edward Kelly to be a speaker. He was impressed to see so many people turn out for an event that wasn’t sponsored by any formal organization. In all, the Task Force and its partners organized and produced four rallies in four years on the grounds of the Capitol.
“When President Kelly saw that crowd he was very moved,” said Wurfel. “That’s about the time the IAFF formally joined with the Fraternal Order of Police working in coalition.”
The following is a list of “Parent” organizations whose members joined the action.
- National WEP/GPO Repeal Task Force
- National WEP and GPO Repeal Movement
- MoveOn WEP and GPO Repeal Petition
- Connecticut Education Association
- Local 740, Portland Professional Firefighters Association, IAFF
- Professional Firefighters of Maine
- International Association of Fire Fighters
- Fraternal Order of Police
- AFSCME Council 93
- MSEA-SEIU Local 1989
- Rhode Island American Federation of Teachers/Retirees Local 8037R
- Polish Strategic Alliance Initiative
- Alliance for Retired Americans
- Connecticut Retired Teachers Association
- Rhode Island
- Connecticut Alliance for Retired Americans
- California Retired Teachers Association
- American Federation of Teachers
- National Association of Retired Federal Employees
The movement was starting to build momentum, but the bill was nevertheless effectively killed by the House Ways and Means Committee in the 117th Legislature. Congressman Richard Neal (D-MA), the chairman of the powerful committee, opposed an outright repeal of the offsets and instead proposed a substandard version of the bill. Despite a growing willingness to surrender and accept compromise, AFSCME Council 93 and its retiree chapter refused to "yield any ground to politicians and advocacy organizations who were eager to put the issue behind them and claim any level of victory."
“We were told we were dreamers, that it would never happen, that it was just too expensive. We heard every excuse in the book,” AFSME 93 Executive Director Mark Bernard. said of the naysayers. “It’s been a real pleasure proving people wrong.”
As Bernard explained in a lengthy blog post, the offset problem was usually dismissed by politicians in Washington as something that only impacted retired public employees in a handful of states. That's why Council 93 — which represents workers in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont — launched an aggressive campaign to reframe the issue as a much more widespread problem. In communications with members, the union stressed that “if we don’t fix this now, you and your spouse will be next." In speaking to private sector union leaders Council 93 pointed out that any of their members who were married to public-sector workers would see their spouses lose their survivor benefit if they pre-deceased their spouse.
"This hit home with these private sector workers, many of whom planned on providing this benefit to their wives and husbands and viewed it as the only form of ‘life insurance’ they could afford," the union wrote. "As part of the reframing, we also noted that because the problem had been in place for 40 years, it was no longer confined to a few states. In fact, there are now people living in every state who are impacted by the WEP or GPO, or both."
However, when it became clear that the repeal legislation wasn't moving forward, AFSCME members turned up the heat on one of its prime obstacles: Congressman Richard Neal. The union first stopped all campaign donations to Neal. And when it came time for the Massachusetts AFL-CIO to make its political endorsements, Council 93 persuaded the state fed to table endorsements to give union leaders more time to get the congressman to change his tune. They also wanted to make sure other members of the Massachusetts delegation did not fall victim to pressure and pull their support should the bill come to a floor vote. They had learned their lesson after being burned by former New Hampshire Democratic Congresswoman Ann Kuster, who withdrew her support from a move to force a floor vote in the previous session.
But when the MA AFL-CIO met again in September, it still didn't have a commitment from Neal to support the bill. After speaking to Neal about AFSCME's problems with his position and informing the full board that the five AFSCME reps would be voting against Neal’s endorsement, he failed to secure the two-thirds majority support needed. He was the only Massachusetts Congressman who was not endorsed by the AFL-CIO.
By that time, the National WEP/GPO Repeal Task Force, as the grassroots group began calling itself, had grown into an effective grassroots coalition utilizing the Facebook group and email alerts. Soon retirees were racking up co-sponsors from their own states.
This time the combination of national and regional unions pushing for this and grassroots member and retiree activism across the country was enough to break the logjam in the Ways and Means Committee. They had finally garnered enough co-sponsors to do a discharge petition to bring the bill out of committee and onto the House floor. It was only the fourth time in history that a discharge petition was successful in the House of Representatives. The legislation now had 326 cosponsors — far more than the 218 signatures required on the discharge petition to force the legislation to the floor for a vote. Needless to say, House leaders, especially the chair of the Ways and Means Committee, were not happy.
By the end of last November the Facebook group had about 51,000 members with 2000 to 3000 core activists getting their friends, family members and parent organizations involved. At its last rally it was raining harder than at Woodstock, said Wurfel, who had attended the legendary music festival 56 years ago. He was waiting for the cheap PA to short circuit at any moment.
“We were building the wheel one spoke at a time until the wheel could finally roll,” he said.
Four days after President Biden’s signing of the bill into law, Wurfel said he is still in shock that leadership in both parties let their members vote their conscience without putting any pressure on them to vote one way or the other. On January 7, the leader of the Task Force, an 87-year old retired teacher from Connecticut named Bette Marafino walked hand-in-hand with the President through the entry door of the White House East Room. She gave a brief speech and then introduced the President as he sat at his desk. The President then proceeded to sign the bill and presented the pen to Bette.
“That was the recognition of how this little grassroots group of union members made this happen even though we weren’t even officially designated by our leadership to do this work,” said Wurfel as he got choked up. “We didn’t raise any money. We didn’t donate to anybody’s PAC or Super PAC. We did not use professional lobbyists."
Although the Task Force has finally achieved its goal for now, the group expects to stay active and engaged in the event that Congress tries to target Social Security again.
“I’m so honored to have fallen into this group of basically 75 to 90 year-old retired female teachers from all over the country,” said Wurfel. “I was the only fireman and Peter Joyce was the only cop. When I tell the story I get so emotional I stutter.”