Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

UNISON Conference Leadership kicks council pension dispute into long grass

by Fred Leplat  |  Socialist Resistance no37  |  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.

Islington UNISON Local government held one of the biggest day of action for over 25 years on the March 28 when over 1million council employees struck in defence of their pension scuenne.

The strength of the joint action forced the employers back to the negotiations but the latest proposals still falls far short of UNISON's conference position of defending the right to retire on a full pension at 60 after 25 years' service, known as the "85 years rule" for all existing and future members of the pension scheme.

It also falls far short of the position argued publicly by UNISON's leadership, which is that of receiving the same offer as the other public sector unions, that is of full protection only for existing members of the scheme.

The latest proposals would:

• Delay the abolition of the "85 year rule until October 2008;

• Offer full protection to existing scheme members over 50 and only limited protection those existing scheme members over 46;

• Those under 46 not only get no protection, but also face not getting the state retirement pension until 66 or later if Blair gets his way!

When the local government unions took strike action over three months acus Dave Prentis, UNISON's General Secretary, made it clear that UNISON was in it for the long haul and that full protection for all existing scheme members was the bottom line.

But now the magnificent dav of action which was celebrated by Dave Prentis and the whole union, now seems to be a distant and faded memory.

Rather than by going ahead with the selective strike action by meat inspectors and UNISON's Dave Prentis wants to be seen to be fighting for pensions ... but not so hard as to offend the New Labour government another one dav strike on the day before the May council elections, the unions have put all further industrial action on hold until further negotiations are held.

The GMB has also made it clear that they do not see further strike action as a possibility.

The fighting language used by UNISON has changed to that of accepting a pension scheme that does not discrim-