A Case for Disability Equity

Among the pension bills vying for legislators’ attention in the closing weeks of the Albany session is one that would give civilian employees in state and city agencies equal footing for disability pensions connected to work they did at designated sites connected to the clean-up and search efforts in the aftermath of the World Trade Center bombing.

Unions including Transport Workers Union Local 100 contend that, while uniformed employees have long enjoyed better disability pensions than civilian workers because of the inherent danger of emergency-services jobs, in this case their members should be entitled to a retirement benefit equal to three-quarters of final average salary that’s awarded to others who contracted life-threatening diseases due to 9/11-related work. As TWU International President John Samuelsen told this newspaper’s Bob Hennelly, “We breathed in the toxic air and are now paying the price for that with our lives. There is no just rationale for disparity in disability benefits for the workers that heroically rose to the occasion.”