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.

I notice that you were quick to dismiss the question about how somebody could have been pushed into poverty solely by the 2011 acceleration of the equalised retirement age.

Firstly, I don’t accept that the message was ‘sneaky’: George Osborne may not have individually called in on each affected woman to discuss the treasury’s plans with her but the change was widely reported. The court found >500 examples of the 2011 change having been mentioned in the media. Yes, the ‘working dogs’ campaign was crap, but it still conveyed the message.

Secondly, I’ve read a range of stories where WASPI women claim to be in poverty because of the change to their pension age. That was one of the cornerstones of the Back To 60 campaign: that as a consequence of the 2011 change, women had been rendered poorer at the point at which they had expected to retire before the 2011 acceleration (eg 63, where their new retirement age from 2011 was 65). This is the bit I don’t get. If you were poor before the change, you won’t get poorer because of your state pension age moving from 63 to 65. If you weren’t poor, the best way of staying like that was to continue work until you could retire. Fuzzy logic. It doesn’t help anybody’s cause. I thought that the judge was quite tactful about this.

Have we been reading the same thread, Echt? You say that nobody has claimed that women were expected to be SAHMs and hence were prevented from building up a pension of their own

Yes. I was responding to this precise segment:

As for those arguing that the women in the WASPI cohort were ordered to stay at home with the kids and not follow proper careers: bollocks

It contains a generalisation that is simply untrue which Is why I said no-one had said it. Lots of posters said lots of things, but not this. I can't be doing with sloppy generalisations.

Jesus. Try again.

Have we been reading the same thread, Echt? You say that nobody has claimed that women were expected to be SAHMs and hence were prevented from building up a pension of their own

Yes. I was responding to this precise statement:

As for those arguing that the women in the WASPI cohort were ordered to stay at home with the kids and not follow proper careers: bollocks

It contains a generalisation that is simply untrue which Is why I said no-one had said it. Lots of posters said lots of things, but not this. I can't be doing with sloppy generalisations. They are the bane of clear discussion on MN.

Irrelevant, it's about the sneakiness of the government, the lack of information.

It was all over the media, it was on the govt websites. Nothing sneaky about it.

Did your parents have to work into their 80s Helena? That is unusual?

@helenaDove can't be arsed to read your link but to bring in the Glasgow bin man is really stupid of you. That man was known to have health issues and ignored advice to stop working.

Someone a few pages back poured scorn on the post I'd left suggesting stores that actively employed older people and asked 'how much did I think they would earn working p//t at B&Q'

Well, the short answer is more than being on a state pension!

The full SP is just under £160 a week.

So, 20 hours @£8 an hour is the same.

I agree 100% with the latest posters who say that no woman who is having to wait another 3 years is going to be that worse off and in fact will be earning more in work than on the SP.

The full SP amounts to around £8K a year if someone qualifies for it.

Don't tell me that these women earn less than that and would be better off on a pension than working.

If they chose to stop work, being deluded that they would get £8K a year at 60 and now find they won't get it, the fault is theirs. There was plenty of warning....

Also, @HelenaDove if someone works in a store there are different roles. You can be on the till or stocking shelves. You don't have to be doing 'manual' work. Same applies to the other examples I gave. Looks like it's you who doesn't really know how these things work. And FGS we are talking about people in their early 60s- not their 90s.

If you were poor before the change, you won’t get poorer because of your state pension age moving from 63 to 65. If you weren’t poor, the best way of staying like that was to continue work until you could retire.

That is exactly right. I was affected by the first change (which I definitely knew about) but not the second, but have continued to work because, although I am not in a well paid role, I am still better off with my salary than with SP and a small work pension. I do have a few friends in the waspi group and do feel some sympathy; though I would feel more if they weren’t all already retired and doing just fine without SP.

^As for those arguing that the women in the WASPI cohort were ordered to stay at home with the kids and not follow proper careers: bollocks

It contains a generalisation that is simply untrue which Is why I said no-one had said it. Lots of posters said lots of things, but not this. I can't be doing with sloppy generalisations.^

While nobody may have said it in those precise words that is the impression I got from a lot of posts on this now extremely long thread. I have read many post where people have seemed to be referring more to our parents generation and a few that made us seem positively Victorian!

Or more my gps generation. My dgm had a skilled job during the 40s and worked. This enabled her and dgf to buy a house. I'm not sure if she had a private pension but she and dgf still did pin money jobs in retirement.

She was very pro education and made sure dm and her siblings worked hard as she had come from a very hard start in life

Sorry I haven’t read the full thread (so I’m sorry if it’s been asked!) I’m genuinely not trying to be goady but can’t some of these women stay in their current place of work until retirement age?

That is what majority will do. I can see that if they lost their job or were suffering ill health there would be a problem.

I'm 60. I'm in full time work, good health and I have no intention of retiring. I don't know anyone of my age who isn't working. Some retired early from teaching or nursing. All have returned on a part-time basis.

My closest friend still works at 73, even though she doesn't need the money.

I think there's a perception that 60 is "old". It really isn't. I'm in better shape than most of my younger colleagues.

I think the decision was the correct one

We fought for the right to be treated the same as men and now we're moaning about it. .

The words "penny" and "bun" spring to mind.....

It contains a generalisation that is simply untrue which Is why I said no-one had said it. Lots of posters said lots of things, but not this. I can't be doing with sloppy generalisations.

While nobody may have said it in those precise words that is the impression I got from a lot of posts on this now extremely long thread. I have read many post where people have seemed to be referring more to our parents generation and a few that made us seem positively Victorian

Precisely. They didn't say it. It really doesn't do to go an impression, or a "vibe" as was posted about teachers in another thread. If posters want to engage, they need to be precise or be prepared to be picked up on it.

We fought for the right to be treated the same as men and now we're moaning about it

Women did not fight for the right to get fucked over by a weaselling government who hid a alteration to the pensions age. None if this is about how fit you feel at 60, it's the principle of stiffing thousands of people.

Precisely. They didn't say it. It really doesn't do to go an impression, or a "vibe" as was posted about teachers in another thread. If posters want to engage, they need to be precise or be prepared to be picked up on it.

Well, I for one, and I doubt if anyone else would want to trawl through a thread of over 700 posts. I do remember someone posting that we all had large families because it was before the pill and thinking the pill was available before any of us had reached the age of consent!

Another thing Idefinitely recall is people saying you couldn’t return to your job after having a baby. It struck me that if you had a baby before the 1975
Employment Protection Act, you were quite a young mum and unless you had a large family, you had plenty of time to return to the workforce when your kids were at school.

Possibly the women who wanted equality with the men were the wealthy ones who didn't require a pension at 60 through ill health or family commitments etc.

If we want equality with men, we can’t add exclusion clauses. Equal pay but oops, we need to retire earlier than you because we’re so dainty and delicate and tire easily. I won’t repeat a point that has been made many times.

I’ve no intention of scrolling back through 30 pages either (although this has been a fascinating thread: thanks to the poster who explained the reasoning behind the unequal retirement age, which was that wives were on average 5 years younger than their husbands and were expected to share their husbands’ pensions).

However there have been many examples of posters claiming that their mothers were forced out of teaching in the 1970s because they were pregnant, or that they themselves were told at school that they should prepare to be wives and mothers, rather than professionals.

I don’t believe the former (a number of posters have disputed it). The latter may be true, but nobody had to accept the ‘woman’s place is in the home’ doctrine. As @CecilyP and @JinglingHellsBells have pointed out, we’re not talking about the pre-war period.

The women born in 1953 would have lived through the first phase of women’s liberation in the early 1970s. They would have gone to David Bowie and T Rex gigs: men in make up. That the social fabric of Britain was changing can’t have been a surprise to them. So-called yuppies and Alexis bloody Carrington were a constant fixture of news and features throughout the 1980s. Why cling to this ‘nobody let me work’ and ‘nobody told me it was normal for women to follow careers’ excuse? It devalues the argument.

I paid a shitload in SERPS and S2P before they were got rid of, which under the old system would have bought me a bigger state pension. Will I get any benefit from them in the future? Will I fuck, but c’est la vie

Transitional arrangements exist to protect entitlements earned before the end of contracting-out.

Firstly, I don’t accept that the message was ‘sneaky’: George Osborne may not have individually called in on each affected woman to discuss the treasury’s plans with her but the change was widely reported

As someone else mentioned upthread, changes to company pensions require consultation. By which every person affected by the change has to be explicitly told about it. The government's own pensions regulator also says they should be given sufficient financial information to be able to compare the before and after position. Unfortunately the government does not hold itself to the same standards it requires of employers.

There isn't a great deal of argument on this thread that pensions should have remained at age 60 as most posters appreciate the demographic arguments, but the second change in 2011 hit a cohort of women very hard. Its very easy to say "keep working" and OK these women will have to, but if your pension is put back 18 months that's £12k or so of lost income, so why not bring a legal case? Similar individual ombudsman cases hinge on what individuals can be reasonably expected to know based on what information they have been provided with and whether they have made financial decisions in light of their understanding.

Also as a separate point, there is a big lack on empathy on this thread. It is possible to think that the government should have won the case from the perspective of the country's finances, without agreeing with their actions which were below the standards that they themselves legally require employers to uphold. I do feel sorry for women with the second whammy even though I think rises in the pension age were necessary.

I think what’s sad on this thread is so many people still infantilising women. All the bizarre claims that women of this generation had no access to contraception, couldn’t join workplace pensions, were expected not to work outside the home and need extra help to men because they got “bad divorce settlements” because pensions were not necessarily taken into account in divorce until 1995 in England.

It’s a sad and inaccurate view of this generation of women many of whom (tbf also on this thread) are quite capable of looking after and taking responsibility for themselves.

It's not inaccurate though. I am looking at a booklet now for a scheme which has 80,000 members and this 1990 booklet has scheme membership open to full time employees only.

A woman working part time could not have joined this scheme.

I have seen many booklets from this era and this is very typical outside of government schemes.

Has anyone actually answered the question: why is it not OK for women in their 50s to have to work until they’re 67 to get their pension, but it is OK for women in their 20s/30s to have to work until they drop, probably because there won’t be a state pension at all by then?

I’ve read various stuff about occupational pensions and opportunities that young women have that weren’t available to older women. I haven’t seen anyone point out that whilst older women are or will be mortgage-free, younger women will by and large still be paying rent in their 50s unless something changes.

Of course it’s not ideal to pit groups against each other, but we need to have a massive conversation now about pensions, in the context of the bigger picture of inter-generational wealth disparity. We can’t look at waspi women in a vacuum.

A woman working part time could not have joined this scheme.

No, but she could have paid into her own private pension scheme like all the millions of people who weren't employed by big firms with pension schemes and self employed did. Huge numbers of people didn't have access to employer pension schemes but managed to make provision for themselves.

If we want equality with men, we can’t add exclusion clauses. Equal pay but oops, we need to retire earlier than you because we’re so dainty and delicate and tire easily. I won’t repeat a point that has been made many times.

There isn't equal pay though that's the point. Not now not ever in the past. Nor in the future if it continues to be that roles that are traditionally female tend to be more poorly paid. Women are at far higher risk of living in poverty than men for a variety of reasons. It is absolutely nothing to do with being 'dainty', that's really insulting to the women who are in poverty tbh.