It is no secret that the IEA leadership is somewhat mass action averse.

But the attack on 386,000 member pensions has made for a dire situation.

Something can happen in the coming days or in the January sessions of the legislature. With the Democrats winning a veto proof majority in the election, there is little to stop Madigan from taking a knife to retiree COLAs. Or worse.

Blogger Glen Brown raised the mass action issue today on his blog.

Now that our legislators have finished carving up their turkeys and have recited prayers of thanks for their power, wealth and abundance at their dinner tables (gobble, gobble), they will be discussing how to carve up the public employees’ defined-benefit pension plan during the Veto session this week and, with voracious appetites, how to pass “pension reform” during the suitably-named Lame-Duck session in January. They will be discussing how to “legally” challenge the Illinois and U.S. Constitutions (without ethical consideration or keeping their oath of office); how to shift the state’s pension payment to school districts despite serious consequences; how to eliminate the public employees’ compounded cost-of-living adjustment, especially for retirees; how to generate a salary cap on current teachers’ earnings (shifting the costs to school districts is one sure way to make sure this will also happen); how to increase the retirement age (with the hope that public employees will die before collecting their pension); how to increase public employees’ contributions to slowly-dying pension systems they helped create; how to pay down the pension debt that they (legislators) machinated; how to entice public employees to opt out of a guaranteed defined-benefit pension plan for a defined-contribution or self-managed savings plan that will never offer public employees a dependable lifetime income; how to continue extortive tax breaks for the wealthiest corporations that finance their campaigns; how to perpetuate lies through media; how to avoid modernizing state and local budgets and their revenue systems… Did I leave anything out? How about having an organized demonstration of 693,000 public employees and their family and friends before the court battles begin?

Now word is circulating that something like that is being planned by the leadership of the state’s public employee unions.

It is about time.