Back in my late teens/early 20's I was a union employee at a grocery store. Tonight I found myself reflecting on the Health and Welfare Benefit Fund letters that the union used to send me, and started wondering if I had actually been vested before I left the job. I got logged in to their site and found that I had completed 4.22 service years. The minimum requirement for the pension is 5 years.
If I did return I'd have to do it for a full year and work at least 1000 hours to get that last vested year of service, which averages out to a bit under 20 hours per week.
In theory, this could be doable for me since I'm only .8 FTE at the hospital I work at (meaning I'm only scheduled work 64 hours per pay period as opposed to the traditional 80). I had taken the lower FTE specifically because we're so short that days off are hard to come by, but overtime is always available to anyone who could want it. This way, if I need days off I can simply choose not to pick up shifts that pay period. In practice, however, I do usually end up working between 80-100 hours per pay period.
So if I were to pick up a part time job at a grocery store that is part of this union, it would pretty much kill my ability to pick up overtime at my current job. Needless to say, my current job pays a lot more than a grocery store would. I get $25.50/hr, and anything over 8 hours in a day or over 80 hours in a pay period is time and a half. The grocery store would probably pay me like $12/hr, maybe $15 if I'm lucky.
The pension itself would be small with only 5 years of vested service - roughly $160/month. It's not much, but it's something.
On the other hand, I imagine it'd probably be more worth my time to use those 1000 hours to just continue picking up shifts at my current job, try to stick a good chunk of that overtime money in to a retirement account, and let interest take care of the rest over the next 35 years or so.
Submitted December 24, 2021 at 06:39AM by Micahccino_ https://ift.tt/3Fr2d01
