23-05-2025
Retired Boston employees push for city to approve a cost of living increase to pension checks
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Officials with some of
the city's most prominent labor unions made their case for the increase before the Boston Retirement Board Friday morning. They were joined by Councilors Ed Flynn and Gigi Coletta Zapata, and council staff representing Councilors Ben Weber and Ruthzee Louijeune. Last year, the council unanimously approved a resolution calling for the COLA increase for retirees, which the board ultimately rejected.
Speaking before the board Friday, Coletta Zapata acknowledged that the members must make a fiscally responsible decision, but argued that the city's retirees 'deserve' the modest bump.
'Our Boston retirees have literally built the city, they've dug trenches, they've kept us safe, they've cleaned our schools,' Coletta Zapata said. 'What I would ask is just to consider what the systemic liability is for choosing to keep people in poverty.'
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Annual COLA payments for retired city of Boston employees are based on a set figure called the 'COLA base,' which is currently $15,000 in Boston. State law dictates that municipalities can approve an annual COLA payment for pensioners of up to 3 percent of the COLA base. Last summer, the Boston Retirement Board voted to give pensioners a COLA payment of $450, which is 3 percent of $15,000, for the 2025 fiscal year.
Retirees, their labor unions, and city councilors are pushing the board to increase the COLA base from $15,000 to $18,000, which would amount to a $90 boost to annual COLA payments if the board approves the full 3 percent adjustment for the next fiscal year.
The city has not increased the COLA base since 2021, when the board raised it from $14,000 to $15,000, according to Janey Frank, a retired Boston Public Schools teacher, who's a leader of the Boston Teachers Union retired teachers chapter.
Retired city employees have only had three COLA base increases since 2010, and those increases combined have only raised pensioners annual cost of living payments from $360 to $450.
An extra $90 a year, which amounts to $7.50 more a month, would matter to struggling pensioners, said Erik Berg, president of the Boston Teachers Union, before the retirement board Friday.
'For most of us, maybe all of us in this room ... that's not a cost that we need to think about,' Berg said. 'We don't need to think about splitting pills in half, paying the light bills, being able to survive in the city after 20, even 30 years of retirement, after devoting your career to the city. But retirees do. A modest increase is affordable to this city.'
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Wu previously said she would support increasing the COLA base from $15,000 to $18,000 in a candidate forum during the 2021 mayoral election, said Elissa Cadillic, cochair of the City of Boston United Retirees and president of AFSCME Local 1526, the local Boston public library employees union.
But when Cadillic and representatives of many of the city's most prominent labor unions met with Wu this week, she told them she couldn't 'in good conscience' advocate for that this year, Cadillic said.
Wu made the same argument speaking to the Globe earlier this month.
'I will always support making sure that our retirees and those who have served the city have the most that we can responsibly deliver,' Wu said. But 'as mayor, I have to make decisions that are based on real time information on what is fiscally sustainable, and I still hope that at some point when the larger economy becomes more stable and that our municipal finances can reliably sustain this as well, that we can keep having that conversation.'
Niki Griswold can be reached at
