Osborne loses his nerve in the face of Union solidarity

ruggedtoast

This is all getting a bit tinfoil hat for me now.

Generali

ruggedtoast wrote: »

This is all getting a bit tinfoil hat for me now.

TBH it's not really anything to worry about.

The maths are simple: unless something changes, people will have to work longer and probably get less pension than they expect/hope for. The politics can only end up about two things, who gets the blame and what is the split going to be between more work and less pension.

ILW

StevieJ wrote: »

Why, are you a housewife?

No, a taxpayer.

RJP33

StevieJ wrote: »

Would I notice a difference if you was on strike?

Is he costing the taxpayer money? Otherwise it's the private companies issue if someone is incompetent.

ruggedtoast

Generali wrote: »

TBH it's not really anything to worry about.

The maths are simple: unless something changes, people will have to work longer and probably get less pension than they expect/hope for. The politics can only end up about two things, who gets the blame and what is the split going to be between more work and less pension.

Are you envisaging a credible scenario where the UK government defaults on pension contracts for several million people?

ILW

ruggedtoast wrote: »

Are you envisaging a credible scenario where the UK government defaults on pension contracts for several million people?

Could easily happen, we are in uncharted territory where whole countries are defaulting on all sorts of things.

headoutthesand

Nothing has actually been mentioned on this thread about the real reason for strike.

Public sector employees are having to pay more out their salary from April 2012 (with no choice in the matter). They will pay more but have their pensions reduced in order to clear the government deficit that has more or less come from bailing out the banks.

Basically the government are putting an extra tax on public sector workers - because they can!

I am a public sector worker who has been TOLD that my pension contributions will go up by almost £100 a month. It's a lot of money to have to budget out your household income when there is only one wage coming in and you have 2 children to support.

Can you imagine if everyone, both public and private workers, in the country was told that they were losing this money out their paypack and that there was nothing they could do about it and they just had to deal with it.....oh and along side that, don't expect a payrise cos we can't afford to give you one.

On the other hand there is an option that public sector workers could use and that is to opt out of their pension.

Imagine if all PS workers did this? We'd still be the baddies for withdrawing our money from public funds

ILW

headoutthesand wrote: »

Nothing has actually been mentioned on this thread about the real reason for strike.

Public sector employees are having to pay more out their salary from April 2012 (with no choice in the matter). They will pay more but have their pensions reduced in order to clear the government deficit that has more or less come from bailing out the banks.

Basically the government are putting an extra tax on public sector workers - because they can!

I am a public sector worker who has been TOLD that my pension contributions will go up by almost £100 a month. It's a lot of money to have to budget out your household income when there is only one wage coming in and you have 2 children to support.

Can you imagine if everyone, both public and private workers, in the country was told that they were losing this money out their paypack and that there was nothing they could do about it and they just had to deal with it.....oh and along side that, don't expect a payrise cos we can't afford to give you one.

On the other hand there is an option that public sector workers could use and that is to opt out of their pension.

Imagine if all PS workers did this? We'd still be the baddies for withdrawing our money from public funds

You are wrong, the vast majority of the deficit is caused by years of spending more on the public sector than was being taken in by tax. An issue that is now trying to be addressed.
The banking crisis really just bought it to a head.

headoutthesand

If the banks hadn't been bailed out, would the public pensions been targeted for change to this degree?

ruggedtoast

ILW wrote: »

Could easily happen, we are in uncharted territory where whole countries are defaulting on all sorts of things.

Oh really, which countries are they then? Argentina was a famous defaulter, do you mean Argentina; or are you just creating a doom laden scenario of economic apocalypse due to a perverse pleasure it gives you based around some public sector workers not getting a pension in 20 years time as this satisfies your own prejudices?

If the government defaulted en masse on pension contracts we wouldn't have a society that was stable enough to support a credible currency anyway, so the point would be moot.

I hope you're stocking up on beans.