Firefighters Get Hammered

Rahm's stooges over at the Sun Times are doing their work well:

• The city of Chicago is paying fire department employees more than $80 million a year for perks that boosted their salaries by an average of more than $15,000 apiece last year, a Chicago Sun-Times analysis finds.

  The salary-boosting extras aren’t reflected in the online database of city workers’ pay that Mayor Rahm Emanuel created in what he described as an effort to provide greater transparency for taxpayers about how City Hall operates.

Transparency? You mean "data manipulation," right?

All of these things were duly negotiated by Rahm's predecessor's people. In most cases, these "perks" were given in lieu of pay raises so the City wasn't on the hook for the pension portion of the salary. It's a trick that allowed the city to pretend they were giving us (and the firefighters) a raise during the good years, but the large benefit went to the city because they didn't have to worry about the longer term money layout.

Of course, looking forward from this point, it appears obvious that the City has (and probably had) no intention of ever making the contractually mandated pension payments and Rahm's tools over at the Times are abetting his efforts to screw the Teachers, the CFD and you can bet, the Police once our turn comes up.