Every time the terrible working conditions our public school teachers have endured for decades are discussed, it is emphasized that they do not enjoy Federal Social security. The real reasons for this are never explained.
Some 40 years ago I had the privilege of sharing countless times in long hours of conversation with Don Sol Luis Descartes, last treasurer of the territory of Puerto Rico and first secretary of the Treasury of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, as a close collaborator of the second Puerto Rican governor, Don Luis Muñoz Marín.
The conversations took place while he was serving as one of the professors of the seminars offered by the Statesman Commission to statesman teachers who wanted to know more about our ideal. When Sol Luis had to teach a class outside of San Juan, I sometimes accompanied him to the island and, inevitably, we had two hours or more to talk, conversations that I have always treasured, as well as my long hours of conversation with other important historical figures, including Don Luis A. Ferré and Don Pepe Trías Monge.
On one occasion, after a teacher made a comment in a class about how unfair the reality that teachers did not contribute to Federal Social Security was, on the way back Sol Luis confessed to me the truth that neither the teachers nor the police contributed to Social Security.
In 1950, the central government was still relatively small and teachers and police accounted for about two-thirds of state employees, Sol Luis told me. If they joined Social Security, the state would have to make a large contribution of 2% of the payroll to Social Security, which deducted the budget for Muñoz, as explained to me who was his last treasurer and, subsequently, his first secretary of the Treasury.
He informed me that Muñoz sent for his principal assistant, Mr. Marco Rigau-who would later become an associate judge of the Supreme Court and, coincidentally, father of my friend and fellow former senator Marco Antonio Rigau— and Sol Luis himself, as treasurer of his government. After discussing the budgetary impact of whether teachers and police chose to contribute to Federal Social Security, he instructed both of them —without any evidence of Muñoz’s intervention or his administration-to generate a ‘sub silentio’ campaign for teachers and police to vote against joining Social Security. The main argument would be that they would enjoy a “better” pension that Muñoz would create locally than that offered by Social Security. That is the truth I heard about 40 years ago from Don Sol Luis Descartes, who personally received that instruction from the governor.
That strategy of not discarding their budgets from 1951 onwards, unfortunately, has contributed to the discarding of the personal budgets of our teachers since then, since Don Luis could never create the illusory local superpension better than the Social Security pension, which for more than 70 years tens of thousands of teachers and police have not been able to receive, and never offered them decent salaries.
In the case of the police, one of my great frustrations in my second term as a senator was, after obtaining the approval of another referendum, the first after the one in 1950 so that the police could vote to contribute to Social Security —even if it was half a century later— by a narrow margin of 49% to 51% they refused to contribute.
Muñoz’s mistake in 1950 should serve as a lesson to public servants in the present and future that one must always think about the long-term welfare of the people, rather than apparent short-term benefits. The mistake of the police, who both in the 1950 referendum and the second one I legislated half a century later when they voted against Social Security contributions, is that they must think about their long-term well-being rather than being carried away by promises of politicians.
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