SALEM — Two of Oregon’s largest public employee unions are drawing the line when it comes to Oregon’s public pension system, saying they won’t endorse, campaign for or donate to Democrats who supported a reform bill that was signed into law in June.

The board of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, voted unanimously over the weekend to disqualify Oregon legislators who voted for Senate Bill 1049 from the union’s 2020 endorsement process. The Oregon AFL-CIO passed similar resolution at a meeting this summer.

Senate Bill 1049 made a variety of tweaks to rein in rapidly escalating costs of the Public Employees Retirement System. The most significant was to extend repayment of the system’s $27 billion deficit for eight years. That move accounted for about three-quarters of the $1.2 billion to $1.8 billion in savings the legislation is expected to generate per two-year budget cycle beginning with the 2021-23 biennium.

That’s not great for PERS members, as the financial strategy further erodes funding for the pension system they rely on. But that’s not what attracted the unions ire.

The cause of the showdown was the bill’s controversial employee cost-sharing provisions, which redirect a portion of the retirement contributions employees currently make to a supplemental 401(k)-like savings plan. Instead, some of those contributions — 2.5% of pay for employee hired before Aug. 28, 2003, and 0.75% for employees hired after — would go into an account that would support pension benefits.

In effect, that will reduce the ending balances in employees’ supplemental retirement accounts, trimming a 30-year employee’s overall retirement benefits by 1% to 2% of pay. The contributions won’t apply to employees making less than $30,000 a year, and the redirection would cease if the pension system’s funded status reaches at least 90%.

The bill also placed a new $195,000 limit on the salary that can be used in PERS retirement formulas, though that’s not expected to impact many employees initially, and the limit is indexed for inflation.