Soary Stars
At the Start
- Joined
- Jun 7, 2011
- Messages
- 648
What a sad state of affairs ... what seems a comedy of make-believe by the public sector unions in the UK, claiming unfair disadvantage to their pension rights, for C's sake!
Not job security, but what they'll retire on.
Picked from The Independent because it suited my case!:
Read on:
"To judge from the opinion polls, the majority of the public as a whole do not support the strike; and indeed, although 75 per cent of those Unite members who voted in the official ballot chose to back the day of action, only 31 per cent of the membership actually turned out – which means that just 23 per cent of Mr McCluskey's members voted for strike action. That level of inertia does not suggest a level of passion to match McCluskey's fiery rhetoric against what he calls "Tory class warriors".
In fact, if there is a class divide within the employment market, the underdogs are definitely not the public sector. As the most recent official figures from the Office of National Statistics show, the median gross weekly pay in the private sector was £465, compared with £539 in the public sector; when employer pension contributions are added in, then the median private sector figure is £479, way below the public sector median of £615. That growing gulf is a reflection of the fact that defined benefit pension plans are all but extinct in the private sector, but still available across the board in the public sector.
It is true that the public sector traditionally expected better pensions, as a quid pro quo for the fact that pay rates were lower than jobs of equivalent responsibility in the private sector. But now (because of Gordon Brown) the gap in basic pay is the other way around. So the fact that the state's employees get an effective bonus of about 30 per cent of their salaries in the form of employer pension contributions (paid for by all taxpayers, including those with no employer pension provision whatever) is objectionable on precisely the grounds that Mr McCluskey seeks to defend his members' privileges: inequity and unfairness.
In this newspaper yesterday, a Torquay teacher called Julia Neal said that she was backing the strike against the Government's proposals because "one of the things I really resent is for teachers to have to work until they're 68". Actually, she will not. Under the Government's highly conciliatory proposals, a 42-year-old teacher who has worked for 22 years and now earns £32,000 a year will have to work until the age of 62 to get the £15,200 a year pension that she would have received from the age of 60; if she decides to work until 67 she could increase her teacher's pension to £20,200 a year. That's not an investment banker's pay-off, but it's an unimaginably good retirement package compared with what awaits those of similar earnings and long service in the private sector, where the average pension pot provides an annuity of just £1,200 a year.
Len McCluskey draws a different contrast: he argues that his strikers are "victims of the elite policy of taking money from the taxpayer to give it to the bankers". Yet if anyone is the biggest victim of that phenomenon, it is the ordinary private-sector workers, whose annuities have been pulverised by the weakness in the stockmarket and the ultra-low interest rates used by the Bank of England to counter the effects of the credit crunch on banks' balance sheets. Because the public sector's pensions come overwhelmingly out of the pot of (future) general taxation, rather than an accrued investment fund, they, by contrast, have been immune.
In other words, tomorrow's day of action is a strike of the haves, largely at the expense of the have-nots."
Not job security, but what they'll retire on.
Picked from The Independent because it suited my case!:
Read on:
"To judge from the opinion polls, the majority of the public as a whole do not support the strike; and indeed, although 75 per cent of those Unite members who voted in the official ballot chose to back the day of action, only 31 per cent of the membership actually turned out – which means that just 23 per cent of Mr McCluskey's members voted for strike action. That level of inertia does not suggest a level of passion to match McCluskey's fiery rhetoric against what he calls "Tory class warriors".
In fact, if there is a class divide within the employment market, the underdogs are definitely not the public sector. As the most recent official figures from the Office of National Statistics show, the median gross weekly pay in the private sector was £465, compared with £539 in the public sector; when employer pension contributions are added in, then the median private sector figure is £479, way below the public sector median of £615. That growing gulf is a reflection of the fact that defined benefit pension plans are all but extinct in the private sector, but still available across the board in the public sector.
It is true that the public sector traditionally expected better pensions, as a quid pro quo for the fact that pay rates were lower than jobs of equivalent responsibility in the private sector. But now (because of Gordon Brown) the gap in basic pay is the other way around. So the fact that the state's employees get an effective bonus of about 30 per cent of their salaries in the form of employer pension contributions (paid for by all taxpayers, including those with no employer pension provision whatever) is objectionable on precisely the grounds that Mr McCluskey seeks to defend his members' privileges: inequity and unfairness.
In this newspaper yesterday, a Torquay teacher called Julia Neal said that she was backing the strike against the Government's proposals because "one of the things I really resent is for teachers to have to work until they're 68". Actually, she will not. Under the Government's highly conciliatory proposals, a 42-year-old teacher who has worked for 22 years and now earns £32,000 a year will have to work until the age of 62 to get the £15,200 a year pension that she would have received from the age of 60; if she decides to work until 67 she could increase her teacher's pension to £20,200 a year. That's not an investment banker's pay-off, but it's an unimaginably good retirement package compared with what awaits those of similar earnings and long service in the private sector, where the average pension pot provides an annuity of just £1,200 a year.
Len McCluskey draws a different contrast: he argues that his strikers are "victims of the elite policy of taking money from the taxpayer to give it to the bankers". Yet if anyone is the biggest victim of that phenomenon, it is the ordinary private-sector workers, whose annuities have been pulverised by the weakness in the stockmarket and the ultra-low interest rates used by the Bank of England to counter the effects of the credit crunch on banks' balance sheets. Because the public sector's pensions come overwhelmingly out of the pot of (future) general taxation, rather than an accrued investment fund, they, by contrast, have been immune.
In other words, tomorrow's day of action is a strike of the haves, largely at the expense of the have-nots."
Last edited:
