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Where would that be then?
Strike! Strike!
- Thread starter Abraxaz1
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Where would that be then?
Seems to contradict what's being reported
http://www.theguardian.com/business...epare-strike-gloom-descends-port-talbot-again
Random anecdotes trump verified articles?
In fairness I think he is quoting partial figures or similar, rather than accounting standard ones.
True. And that's normally more than enough for a union to take a view and broadcast it as truth.
Soldato
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Live in the North East near Consett so just one query, we still have a steel industry!?
Man of Honour
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Steel was big business in Consett back in the day.
Permabanned
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what is stopping this happening with other pensions? I support them in their grievance but dont thinkbits going to help the industry. As right as you think they are. It is this type of thing that makes running big industry in the uk less of a good option than doing it elsewhere.
Deleted member 66701
Deleted member 66701
Trade unions are getting oragnised in developing countries (even in China) and governments are consenting to giving better workers rights and legitimise Trade union representation as a result in those countries.
Work will start coming back as T&C's and workers rights get depressed here and elevated elsewhere. For example, a lot of programming is coming back from India now as thier wages are now on a parity with ours.
Hungary is the new offshore location for IT now.
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Soldato
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Get your strikes in jow before they change the laws.
I'm not a leftynor a union man but the non repayment of the loan is galling.
It has already happened to most pensions. Only a handful of defined benefit / final salary schemes remain open to new employees in the FTSE-100 firms. British Steel's defined benefit pension scheme had already closed to new employees a couple of years ago. The final position of the pension scheme, as with many other defined benefit schemes, is pretty stark. It is worse, as it represents an industry and workforce that has hugely diminished in size over the years.
https://www.bspensions.com/media/userfiles/files/Newsbrief2014.pdf
From the linked you can see that the pension scheme has around 143,000 members. Of these over 91,000 are pensioners and are being paid by the scheme. A further 34,000 no longer pay in to the scheme and are waiting to start taking their pension. Just 17,000 members continue to pay into the scheme.
The scheme has a fund value of just under £13 billion.
In 2013/14 employees and the employer paid in £144 million. The fund made an investment return of just under £200 million.
In the same time period the fund paid out over £580 million in payments to pensioners. It sounds silly when talking about a fund size of some £13 billion, but the fund is starting to run out of money. There's plenty of value but it has significant future liabilities. It needs to keep paying for all the existing pensioners and prepare to pay for all the future pensioners, many of which no longer pay into the scheme. The fund aims / has to last until the very last pensioner takes his / her last payment out of it.
The solutions to the problem for pension schemes like this are brutally simple and all unattractive. It can either pay out less - reduce the benefits of those who are yet to take their pension (lower the accrual rate or extend the retirement date so people draw from it later in life and) - or increase its funding by employees and / or employer paying more in. Or a combination of the two.
Not surprisingly, the employees want the employer to maintain existing conditions and increase the funding by however much is required. Equally unsurprising is that the employer doesn't want to pay out any more, especially when it is making a loss.
Pension scheme trustees are presented with a near impossible task to manage the situation.
I couldn't see any details of the loan that's been mentioned - does anyone have more information about this?
Deleted member 66701
Deleted member 66701
TLDR - company made promises it couldn't keep.
Remember that pensions are deferred salary/wages, so that changing the payment terms is like your employer saying "oh yeay, I know I said I'd pay you £20k a year to do this job, but I can't afford it so I'll only pay you £16k, oh and I'm back dataing that so I'll only pay you £14k from here on in unil it balances out".
People have every right to be ****** off about it.
Companies that can't maintain thier commitments should be forcibly transferred to someone that can.
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My feeling as well. Perhaps taking the company to court would put more pressure on them than the strike...
To an extent, yes. It could afford the promises when it made them, when conditions and the business were very different. It had a huge workforce and people didn't live as long.
And they're therefore just as vulnerable as employed wages, and just as vulnerable to the financial health of the business. At least there is now the Pension Protection Fund in place should the employer cease trading or the pension scheme need to be wound up. There was little if no protection beforehand.
Yes, of course they do. It is a change to what they expected.
In an ideal world, yes. But someone still has to pay for the commitments, and if the business is loss making or otherwise unsustainable then nobody would take them on.
Defined benefit pensions sit uncomfortably in today's more mobile and diverse economy. They were designed at a time when workers rarely moved jobs, and didn't live long when they retired, and when businesses operated in a more stable environment.
The shift towards employees shouldering the risk and responsibility for their retirement, with the employers contributing towards it, has already happened. The pain of moves such as the one by British Steel is because they've maintained the old status quo for far too long and the change in mindset, and increase in financial resource needed, is therefore so great.
Definitely a difficult time for the 17,000 active members of the scheme, and the 30,000+ deferred members. They should have seen it coming when the scheme was closed to new entrants a couple of years ago, but that doesn't ease the pain when it actually happens.
The same problem is happening in the public sector which, despite the most recent reforms, still operates a hugely expensive pension scheme in which the employer - the taxpayer - shoulders an excessive amount of risk.
I thought Mr "Two Jags" did more or less the same thing rather more recently, And the pension industry has never been the same since!
Don't you mean Gordon brown? Two jags is Prescott.
Nice trolling, but totally incorrect.
Did I say that? No. I made a choice on my career and retirement path and so did everyone else. What I'm saying is it needs to be fair for everyone. You need to start fixing the system now or it will break beyond repair and bring the country to its knees. Private sector employees in their tens of millions have taken massive hits in their already rubbish pensions, but because they can't strike en masse, nobody else knows about it. If you cut a few thousand firefighters' pay rise by 2 percent however and there becomes a national crisis.
Don't put all your eggs in one basket, put simply. Whoever solely relies upon a single pension for the past 50 years is unfortunately heavily misguided. Massive recessions occur every 20 to 30 years; never keep your assets in one place. I am simply forced to as there's no other livable option.
Deleted member 66701
Deleted member 66701
Did you not?
They need to get organised then and re-aquaint themselves with thier backbone.
I'm in favour of changing schemes like that for new members, but it's pretty unfair to change the pensions of people who've been paying in for years. What if at some point in your career you could have moved jobs to have better pay now but a worse pension in the future and didn't do it? You'd be absolutely livid.
Have always said pension schemes are like a massive pyramid scheme, although you've articulated it much better than I would've done.
That said, I still pay into my company pension, not expecting much from it but somethings better than nothing.
The reality of unfinanced pension schemes is going to be coming round to kick a LOT of people in the ass in the coming years.
It's not about 'fair' or 'deserved', it's about there actually existing enough money to pay people. So many gaping funding holes in pension funds, even without factoring in people living longer etc.
It's not about 'fair' or 'deserved', it's about there actually existing enough money to pay people. So many gaping funding holes in pension funds, even without factoring in people living longer etc.