Burgess blows the whistle on Tory sneak attack upon our pension rights

UNISON General Secretary candidate, John Burgess (Secretary of the Barnet branch) is highlighting the Government’s attack on the pension rights of redundant fiftysomething public sector workers, which they are smuggling through in a rushed consultation on limiting pay offs (or “exit payments”).

This is a very serious attack upon older workers with long service in pension funds – as John puts it “if we don’t stop this then longer serving local government workers in their mid to late 50s will not be able to get an unreduced pension if they are made redundant in spite of the LGPS Regulations.”

This is a serious issue for all public service workers – including the costs of permitting unreduced pensions within an overall cap on compensation amounts to an unanticipated and unannounced attack upon rights which thousands of workers believed that they had been building up for years.

Of course we would sooner that there were no redundancies and therefore no need for redundancy compensation – but under cover of a hue and cry about “excessive pay offs” the Tories are, as John says, sneaking through a serious assault upon UNISON members’ rights – and UNISON must now lead the opposition to this attack.

Regular readers of this blog (Sid and Doris Blogger) will realise that I have abandoned my previous position of “armed neutrality” in respect of the forthcoming election for UNISON General Secretary (about which more later no doubt).