Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

Public sector union bureaucrats sell out on pensions (continued)

Socialist Resistance no30  |  page 7

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

UNISON

STRIKE

ACTION TO DEFEND

Also, members of the SWP and Socialist Party on the PCS Executive voted to approve the two-tier deal despite articles in their press critical of the deal.

As we go to press, negotiations are continuing on the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS).

Although the General Secretary of UNISON, Dave Prentis, has called for the protection that was offered to existing NHS, teachers and healthcare workers to be extended to local government, he has put the majority of his members in a precarious position by supporting a partial deal without their consent, and has left little room for manoeuThe news media have porUNISON PROTECT OUR

UNISON PENSIONS trayed public sector workers as greedy, noting that most private sector workers have no occupational pensions at all, thereby implying that public sector workers should be happy with peanuts.

They conveniently fail to mention the pensions of private sector bosses and members of the New Labour government far outweigh the meagre amount paid out to the average public sector worker. For example, the average UNISON member retiring from a local government job receives under £3,800 a year under the LGPS.

The attempt by the media and New Labour to convince people that if they live longer they must spend NOV those extra years of their lives working is a cynical attempt to make opinion "fact".

The government, bosses and corporations want us to believe our lives must be beholden to capital at the expense of living.

The battle for the right to retire at 60 is nothing less than the struggle to retain our right to be free from the world of work after years of labour as opposed to working until the day we die -which no doubt the bosses would prefer.

The two-tier deal on pensions has made this struggle even more difficult for the new generations of people joining the public sector workforce today.