You don’t have a ‘highest three’ calculation in your sysytem.
If you did, the system you worked under would begin to adjust to those all important three years, with promotions, job title changes, and other methods that would give you an extra 10 or 20% of pay for those three years.
The article says that its the last five years of service verses the last three years of service. This is different from the “highest three” which would be the highest salary made for any given three years.
If we are talking about the last three years salaries versus the last five years salaries, I don’t think it makes much of a difference. It is possible someone could experience two promotions within the last five years of service. In this case they could experience a significant lost in their retirement. More likely, within the last five years of retirement, a person MAY have experienced one promotion and that would probably have been early within that five year window. But for the most part, I don’t think there are very many people who are promoted in the last five years EXCEPT corrupt bureaucrats who are friends with other corrupt bureaucrats trying to pad their retirement. (I’ve seen this happened.)
In rereading the article, where the problem seems to be is in giving people free medical who retire August 1st and making those who do not retire pay at least a portion of their costs. What that portion is hasn’t been decided so it’s hard to say how much they would lose.
I think it is wrong for any company or government entity to promise people pensions and benefits only to take those benefits away because the company is having problems. People make lifetime decisions based upon what they are promised in benefit packages. They cannot make wise choices if twenty years later a company says, “Oops, sorry but we don’t have enough money that we promised.” This isn’t like the folks at Enron who could have diversified. It is more like the folks at United Airlines who the Supreme Court gave the go ahead to to rob their pension plan to strave off banruptcy. If the rules change, the people may not have joined United or would have change their saving strategies.
If companies or the government want to reduce benefits it should be on the new workers who can make those choices-not on the people who are two-three years from retirement. It’s like telling someone who is 72 years old they are no longer going to get Social Security or Medicare.