Teachers Want Higher Pay, but Pensions Swallow Up the Money Offer them a deal: a raise in wages in exchange for forgoing defined-benefit retirement plans. DiSalvo, Daniel. Wall Street Journal (Online) New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]30 Sep 2019.

A record number of American public-school teachers have walked off the job over the past two yearsand now another strike looms in Chicago. Chief among the teachers' demands is higher pay. They're often rightteacher pay is too lowbut for the wrong reasons. Teachers and their unions typically attribute low salaries to flat or falling state spending on education, with skinflint politicians to blame. But in most places education spending is rising. It isn't showing up in teachers' paychecks because so much of it gets diverted to pay for expensive retirement benefits for former teachers. Politicians' overly generous past promises, sometimes made at the behest of teachers unions, are now coming back to bite the education sector. The Chicago Public Schools have a pension shortfall of $11 billion. Retirement costs devour more than 25% of the money the system receives from the state. Such costly benefits constrain it and other school systems from offering higher salaries to teachers, increasing support staff, and reducing class sizes. This is the under-the-radar driver of teacher protests in Arizona, West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Colorado and North Carolina and cities such as Los Angeles and Denver. For years, states and school districts didn't save enough money to cover the retirement promises they made to teachers. Now the bills are coming due. They have to be paid; strong contractual protections mean that outside of bankruptcy it is legally impossible to reduce these pensions. It is also morally difficult to cut retiree medical coverage for midcareer employees who have been planning on receiving it. Today nearly 90% of teachers participate in defined-benefit pension plans. According to a report by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington-based nonprofit, these plans have total estimated unfunded liabilities of more than $500 billion. Consequently most employer contributions aren't saved for future retirees but used to pay off debt. In Arizona 82.7% of the employer contributions to the teacher pension system goes to paying off unfunded liabilities. Chad Alderman of Bellwethers Education Partners, an education policy group, estimates that West Virginia teachers forgo compensation equivalent to more than 20% of their salaries to pay down pension debt.

Question: Employee monetary compensation vs. benefits is becoming a dilemma. What is the middle ground in the dilemma?