UNISON NEWS

Health workers’ pensions are honoured

(18/10/05) UNISON has welcomed the deal on pensions for health workers, the civil service and teachers that guarantees lifetime protection for all current employees and their existing pension provision.

The union is now calling for the principles of the new deal to be applied to the local government pension scheme.

UNISON general secretary, Dave Prentis, said that the government had honoured its pensions contract with the nation’s health workers.

“They will have lifetime protection of their existing pensions provision, including their retirement age,” he said.

He added that the union will now start talks to negotiate new schemes for new entrants which will be index linked defined benefit schemes, with no central direction over the type of scheme. There will also be provision in those new schemes for people to pay a more into the scheme over a lifetime of work to retire at 60 if they wish to do so.

But Prentis said that this deal was just one part of the jigsaw.

“We want the principles established here to be applied to the local government scheme,” he said.

“These principles have been endorsed by the Cabinet. It is important that the promise made to teachers, health workers and civil servants applies also to the more than 1. 3 million local government workers.

“We are confident that the deputy prime minister will want to play fair by the local government workforce.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4353444.stm

Apparently new staff can also retire at full pension at 60, but only if they pay increased contributions. I was at the Unison pay seminar in London where this was announced. Karen Jennings asked me if I thought health members would welcome this deal; I replied that it was a step forward, but our local consultation earlier in the year revealed that members weren’t prepared to accept a bum deal for new starters, and didn’t want to be divided from local government colleagues.

Martin Booth

We can’t be unreservedly happy. Certainly, the “deal” will come as a relief to many people who saw their pensions going up in smoke, but the pensions problem has only been deferred and passed on to another generation of public service workers. Looked at more broadly, I think we have to ask what this whole question about pensions really means.

I belong to a generation who were promissed better health and longer lives, which would be greatly enhanced by the benefits of technology; we were told that we would all retire earlier and, freed from the drudgery of being a wage slave, would at last be able to enjoy our lives to the full. This didn’t come from wild-haired revolutionaries, but from the pundits of capitalism. In reality, however, we have seen the pressures of life increasing dramatically since the 1950s, in both the economic and social spheres, along with an increase in certain kinds of illnesses and a rising suicide rate among the young. As for technology, its main effect has been to intensify the exploitation of labour. Moving the retirement age has nothing to do with challenging ageism and allowing workers to live freely creative and productive lives, but is all about squeezing out every last drop of labour power before the husk is cast aside.

Can this “super-exploitative” capitalism provide us with even a decent pension after a lifetime of hard labour? It seems it cannot, at least not without seeing its profits undermined. Sooner or later we need to ask whether we are content to cut defensive deals at the expense of our children, or whether we are ready to turn our trade unions into aggressive organisations of struggle for a world fit for them to live in.

Ron Graves

Are we pleased about the pensions staying at 60 for us but not for new staff?

Stephen Lintott