Negative solidarity and "gold plated pensions"

Former SSY members not happy about their pensions

Pensions might seem an odd topic to write about on the Scottish Socialist Youth blog. It’s surely decades until SSY members’ need to start worrying about retirement, right?

But the fact is, if the UK government have their way, we’ll suffer when we’re older in a way that hasn’t really been seen since the establishment of the welfare state. For local government workers today, they can look forward to living on an average of £4000 a year. But it gets worse than that – when you take out the fact that men still earn more than women, you realise that women get just £2600. That’s just £50 a week!

The situation for people who work for a private business is even worse. The vast majority of private companies have in recent years got rid of any kind of decent pension scheme for their workers. Most don’t provide anything at all. This is because their workers haven’t been able to be organised enough to defend their rights, and company directors have seen pensions as an easy target as they to try to make their businesses more profitable, and themselves more rich. Their workers are forced to survive on the basic pensions provided by the benefits system, barely enough to survive.

Workers in the public sector have been slightly more successful in defending their rights, because they have more powerful unions to represent them. But, as you can see from the figures above, it’s still a poverty ridden old age they have to look forward to, and in fact unions negotiated reductions in pension entitlements under the previous Labour government.

The ConDem government is determined to make those of us who are working today get less when we’re old. To do this, they’ve tried to make people believe that public sector pensions are in crisis, and that the state can’t afford to pay people what they’ve been promised as they work hard keeping schools open, rubbish off the streets or supporting vulnerable people. Workers have paid into pensions with their own money. The government wants them to pay more, receive less for their money, and work longer.

The government has already announced it wants to make men work until they’re 66 from 2016, and women’s retirement age will be raised that high soon after. They’ve even hinted that after that they might look at making people work until they’re 70! They claim this is to take account of rising life expectancy. But of course this ignores the fact that people who work manual jobs, suffer from poverty or live in working class areas consistently don’t live as long as the average lifespan, because of the negative impact on their health of social inequality.

"I can't believe I still can't retire!"

Another sneaky move by the government was to slip through a major change to the way pensions are calculated in the”emergency” budget. They changed the measure of inflation used to work out what you should get. Pensions will now be worked out on the basis of the Consumer Price Index, instead of the Retail Price Index. I won’t go into the technical differences between the two here, the point is they’ve changed the way the sums are done to make sure workers get less. It’s been done as part of the small print, in a way most folk won’t notice or understand. This completely breaks a promise the government made not to attack accrued benefits – that is, money you’ve already paid into your pension.

If we try to understand it in terms of pay packets – your boss can pay you less in the future, but they can’t take money out of what you’ve already been paid. But that’s exactly what this underhand measure does. Money that is yours, that you’ve been promised, will be taken away from you by some creative accounting.

To get away with all this, the government has used what some people call negative solidarity. Negative solidarity is the feeling of anger many people get when they see that their own working conditions, wages and pensions are being drastically cut, but that others aren’t doing so badly. It’s the opposite of real working class solidarity, because instead of people coming together to fight for everyone to have better conditions at work and in communities, people think that if they’re having a hard time, then why should someone else have it better. You can see it any time there’s an online news story about a strike and you read the comments: they’ll be full of people saying “plenty of people would love to have their job, blah blah blah.”

Tories claim this is where pensioners take a dump while enjoying the People's Friend

Bad as this kind of thinking is, it’s based on what people have experienced for about 20-30 years now: the world of work getting worse, jobs getting harder, wage cuts and the decline of workplace organisation. This makes people believe that there’s only one way working conditions can go: down. Therefore, when they see another group of people trying and even succeeding in resisting this, they get annoyed. This, of course, suits the government down to the ground.

The government has put out all kinds of stories trying to make the people who don’t work for the public sector envious of the people who do. They’ve talked endlessly about “gold plated” pensions, trying to conjure up an image of former bin men glugging champagne in their limos. They’ve once again fiddled the figures as well, to try and make it look like the cost of paying the current pensions will be huge, when independent advice to the government shows that that isn’t true. What will drive the cost of pensions up is reducing the protection for public sector workers when they get older, forcing more people onto the measly state pension that keeps older people from actually starving.

Instead of listening to this advice, the government has trumpeted the findings of an “independent” commission. The Public Sector Pensions Commission, which submitted a report on pensions to the government which they are using as a major part of their cuts agenda, is actually a front for a bunch of people who hate the idea of public pensions: the Institute of Directors and Institute of Economic Affairs.

Can you spot the difference between this and public sector pensions?

The Institute of Directors is basically a big club for company directors, the very same people who have been responsible for stealing away the pension rights of private sector workers. The Institute of Economic Affairs describes itself as “the UK’s original free market think tank,” and is basically a campaign based on pretty extreme right wing economics, dedicated to undermining the role of the public services in our lives so that more things can be turned into profit making businesses to make money for them and their chums.

All the people on the government’s “independent” commission came from these two groups of scumbags. For an idea of what they think about public sector pensions, check out the IoD publication ‘Pensions Apartheid‘. The fact that these people see fit to compare public sector pensions with the crimes of a brutal racist regime in South Africa speaks volumes. They shouldn’t be allowed to provide cover for the ConDems strategy when it comes to pensions: divide the working class between public and private workers, the better to screw us all over and leave us facing poverty in old age.

What’s essential is that we work to expose the government’s lies when it comes to pensions. As the PCS union has argued, the real pensions timebomb is the poverty that government cuts will force those of working today into when we retire. They’ve produced a helpful myth-busting guide, that gives the facts to put up against ConDem lies.

What awaits you in retirement in the ConDem fantasy la la land