International comparisons show that the UK spends far less that the EU average share of national wealth on pensions - just over 5 percent in 2000 compared with an EU average of over 9 percent, while Germany spent almost 12 percent and Italy almost 14 percent.
The privatisation of pensions which gathered Harry Sloan UNISON General Secretary Dave Prentis has predicted a wave of strikes "bigger than the [1926] General Strike" in protest at the Blair government's plans to axe pension rights for millions of public sector workers.
Prentis was deliberately upping the ante on what proved a relatively low-key TUC Day COT Action on February 18, after talks with Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott and local government employers aimed at! defusing the row had ended without agreement. this one is one of the 1 public sector unions now balloting its 800,000 members in local government over industrial action on March 23 to fight changes in the Local Government Pension Scheme that would mean people working longer, or retiring on smaller pensions.
Other unions balloting or considering action include the civil service union PCS, Amicus, the T&G, the Fire Brigades Union and construction union UCATT.
"We will get a resounding yes vote, we have no doubt," Prentis told the BBC. Public sector workers "have never had high rates of pay, never been an aristocracy of the working class, but they have always expected to have a pace under the Thatcher government also means that the UK has vastly larger private pension funds that the rest of Europe, but even the private funds, totaling over £800 billion, do not compensate for the under-investment of state funding and the low levels of contributions required from British-based employers. org
tOp On 22 PENTON: reach 65, so increasing the retirement age would mean that many more workers would die without claiming a penny of the pension they are currently entitled to.
Raising the retirement age for civil servants to 65 would save an estimated £254m a year - about 2 percent of the
But of course the figure is a grotesque exaggeration, since it represents how much the government would have to borrow now to create a fund that would pay all 3 million public sector workers their full pension entitlements.
These pensions have always been funded on a pay as you