To think the back to 60 campaign is grabby

[Neaoll]

It's been known about for a long time that state pension ages would be equalised.

State pension is just unsustainable, it was never supposed to be something people claim for 20-30 years. Was for people that had a hard time so they didn't starve to death in their last few years. Now it's a top-up to the richest part of society. It should have been linked with life expectancy a long time ago.

I'm in my 40s and dont expect to ever get a state pension. I've been contributing to my private pension ever since I worked to support myself.

Genuine question: how many of the affected women on here genuinely need the money for food/bills? And how many just want the extra money for holidays/luxuries?

Why should 20-30 year olds pay for someone else’s luxury retirement cruises when they are being charged 9k a year for university? The state pension should be for basic living when you are too old to work, if you have a private pension, spend that on luxuries, or work like everyone else has to. Stop feeling entitled to an 8 year state funded holiday

@trewser So where are you in all of this? You employ women. You run a business. You are educated and make money from women?

@mrsmuddlepies is not judging women any more than you are judging so-called 'professionals'.

Come on- stop these pot shots at 'professional women'.

There are plenty of jobs for women who are not professional that do not involve scrubbing floors and building roads.

We professional women could argue we lost 4 years of earning power as students while our counterparts went straight into jobs and added 4 more years of salary to their lives.

We are talking of the difference between 60 and 65. (or in my case 66.) You'd think women were being asked to work till they were 80.

It's actually quite sickening that women feel they deserve special treatment when we have spent decades asking for equality.
And don't start the 'they didn't know about it'- we did. For the last 22 years.

I get free prescriptions because of my age. I get free flu jabs because of my age, so the Government recognises that people aged 60+ are different from, and more vulnerable than people in their 20s and 30s - except for work. Cognitive dissonance?

@marina - get free prescriptions and flu jabs because I’m diabetic, doesn’t mean I can’t work or that I need a pension!

Yes and that is ridiculous- free prescriptions etc. The sooner it is changed the better. Again, it's an archaic rule that no longer applies to current life expectancy and fosters the idea that at 60 you are over the hill, sick and need free drugs. What bollocks.

I'm 66. I was informed that I couldn't retire at 60 , years before that age. It was to be staggered if you were born between 1950 and 1955. A few years before I reached retirement age I was told it was being altered again and I was to work an extra 6 months. This happened as planned and I got my pension at 63.5 years old.
How people who are in their 50s now are saying it has come as a shock to them now I can't understand. The information is out there.
Also , I've never understood why men should have to work loner than women

We should all be treated equally, but the difficulty is that women in their late 50s and 60s now weren't always. Denied access to occupational pension schemes due to sex then having the advantage that balanced that out removed, that is not equality. I've no sympathy with the idea that people didn't know in advance, I was aware in the late 90s, but the point is that this was still too late to be able to put themselves in the same position as they would've been without sex discrimination.

We are going to have to make some pretty unpleasant choices about pensions soon enough though, no getting round that.

I need free drugs to stay alive. I've helped fund free drugs for others since I started work at age 15.

I'm a woman of the Waspi generation.

Others have already covered the discrimination, the lower pay, the loss of income due to taking time out for children and the consequent loss of skills and status within the workplace and the struggle to make up for those gaps/ setbacks. It's all true. At almost every interview I attended for my first job in 1982 I was asked whether I was married, had a boyfriend and when I planned to have children. These were interviews with major companies with HR departments: Rank Hovis McDougall, blue chip London advertising agencies. Job after job after job, management were all male. In the late 90s I applied for promotion. I was told to my face that I was the best candidate but my colleague Dave had a wife and child to support and so they were giving him the job. I asked them to put that in writing and they laughed at me.

I'm all for equality. So when a woman can expect to earn the same as an equivalent man over her working lifetime: when men take equal responsibility and experience equal workplace stigma for raising their children: when men do an equal amount of housework and emotional work: when as many men as women compromise their earning potential and future financial security to care for the elderly or dependants then – only then – I'll be completely comfortable with an equal retirement age.

I'm really pleased that things are so much better for some of you. It's good to see the things I and so many other women of earlier generations fought for paying off. Perhaps that's why it's particularly hard hearing someone who's standing on the shoulders of other women telling us that we should have done it differently. Don't forget, all you high-achieving younger women in your 30s and 40s, that sex inequality runs deep through our society still. And just because you, personally, have managed to escape it (or think you've escaped it) doesn't mean that you are typical and that every women can be like you.

Genuine question: how many of the affected women on here genuinely need the money for food/bills? And how many just want the extra money for holidays/luxuries

How can you know your projected needs? This women thought they'd get a pension at 60. Then they got fucked. What else is in the pipeline?

Also , I've never understood why men should have to work loner than women

They shouldn't . And they should get equal pay.

Patnotpending

Big round of applause from me.

@Patnotpending Excellent post.

WellButterMyArse I don't follow some of your post. Women many have missed out being able to build an occupational pension for all sorts of reasons ( p/t work, staying out of work etc) BUT many many men do not have an occupational pension and rely on the state pension- which they only receive at 65. The normal age for retirement for men is 65, not 60 though in the public sector retirement can be from 55 on a reduced occ pension.

The women with no private pensions are in exactly the same circs as men who have to work till 65 and have no private pensions.

And we knew about it a long time ago.

This is the correct decision by the high court. The equalisation of pension ages is decades overdue. Equality doesn’t mean “only when it suits us”.

We aren't going to get state pensions anyway, many will be dead before they reach pensionable age.
It's been conveniently set at the average age people die.
HTH

And individual responsibility is absolutely part of building a decent, upstanding, healthy adult life.

But so is collective responsibility. We need to have that to build a decent, upstanding healthy environment in which individuals can flourish.

No-one person can do everything for themselves, take responsibility for everything in their lives. We’d never have been able to hunt larger animals, develop agriculture, build homes or cities, make scientific progress, develop medicine without people banding together. Making provision for later life is no different.

We need to think responsibly collectively as well as individually. Norway did that, we have opportunities now to do that with more sustainable energy sources (wind/wave/solar power for example).

@Trewser You said 'the women you employ'. I don't know your role but if you are a business owner or in HR aren't you being a bit two-faced here? You are making money out of women working yet you are saying here that they ought to be able to retire earlier.

And don't start the 'they didn't know about it'- we did. For the last 22 years

No they didn't. The government said so, and the '54 women's warning was well -hidden.

YABU

I'm in my 50's and have worked since leaving school at 15. Where I grew up the vast majority of secondary school leavers went to work in the local factories or down the mines. You weren't encouraged to stay at school and get an education if you were female, instead, you were expected to get married and have children. I went to night school and now have a degree but that was very unusual in my East Midlands town.

Suggesting that older women suddenly find a change of career in their 50's is a non starter.
Where are the jobs for an inexperienced 50+ yr old?
Have you ever tried changing career in your 50's and getting someone to take you on?
I have and it's pretty depressing to be constantly overlooked for someone from the young attractive crowd.

Sounds like OP is a member of the right wing school of suggesting plausible sounding solutions whilst not actually having a clue whether it's workable.

Bit like Boris and his ludicrous non-solutions to the Border issue.

It's been conveniently set at the average age people die

You need to do some reading.

Average life expectancy for a woman now aged 65 is 88.

Equality doesn’t mean “only when it suits us”

When men take career breaks to have and raise children, go back to work part time to combine work and childcare and then when they are int their 50s, go part time again to help care for their elderly parents, then we might have equality. When all that is absolutely a given so that employers realise those things might happen if they employ a bloke, then we can talk.

Equality doesn’t mean “only when it suits us”

This was not the point of the case.

Pat

Brilliant post , especially the bit about standing on the shoulders of others, too right.