With pay raises that aren’t high enough to convince already-frustrated teachers to stay in the classroom, and the Senate’s failure to pass any other measures that might delay their retirement, there’s going to be a lot of pressure on the Senate to go along with a House plan to entice retired teachers to return to work.

It’s a terribly unfair idea: It means that teachers who haven’t retired — even some who are eligible to retire — could suddenly find themselves making significantly less money than the teacher in the classroom next door. And it could end up making the situation even worse, by persuading even more teachers to go ahead and retire.

So if the Senate goes along with the plan — and we’re not at all convinced it should — it must extract some significant concessions to prevent people from retiring when they’re still young enough to continue working.

At issue is a very smart state law that limits double-dipping — that is, retiring from state employment and then returning to a new job (or even the same job) while collecting a pension. The 2012 law doesn’t prohibit people from coming back to work, but it cuts off any additional pension payments in any year in which they earn $10,000 in state salary. Note that they still can collect their full salary and part of their pension, just not all of it.

Besides the problems double-dipping creates with morale among people who haven’t retired and returned, the practice helped contribute to the unsustainable unfunded liability in the state government retirement system. That deficit has already forced the Legislature to raise pension payments from state employees and state and local governments to uncomfortably high levels, and more

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