Ageism,ignorance, intolerance. class bias on mumsnet re Waspi women

[CAJIE]

I did not honestly expect any compensation though I might have hoped. Iwas aware of this change but did not have the chance to make extra provision for it.I do have a professional pension but will have to wait a while longer for the state pension which is extremely challenging.My plans were changed by covid and I doubt I will be employed again except possibly on poor and temporary contracts or gig economy.Secondary school supply on a daily basis has more or less gone.
However what appals me is the attitudes of many mumsnetters who assume that everyone has the abiity to understand pensions and that the Waspi women should have taken so called control of their situation.Maybe some could but there is a hell of a lot of class bias towards the women in lower paid jobs who perhaps were overwhelmed by struggling to survive and did not understand or read the news or the pension changes were not clearly explained to them.Pensions can be hard to understand and provoke anxiety.This appalling prejudice that all older people are rolling in it and this nice habit of some younger women to be sadly quite misogynistic and ageist towards women who are in poverty is very concerning.All sections of society should thrive even in older age and perhaps you younger women should be challenging society, housing costs, the whole ideology of owning a house and actually trying to build something new rather than bitching about what boomers have and their endless cruises etc.
.You are turning against your sex and the comments are cruel and harsh.You know nothing about these womens lives.
Starmer wants to punish older people and older women are always a good target.Your spite about all the things that boomers are supposed to have and you apparently dont is unpleasant.Women beware women.Very sad and against justice.

Early retirement ( 55 - 60) particularly for government employees including NHS is actually good for the economy, saves ££££ in senior public sector pay, avoids complex redundancy HR issues and provides free care and social support for elderly parents, grandchildren and volunteers who run .... well - everything!!!

In my experience folk who retire early in the public sector often come back to the same role part time on an agency basis being paid more than their colleagues for the same work while also drawing their public sector pension.

@Jellycatspyjamas that's because it's literally cheaper to give them early retirement and pay them as agency staff. Although they won't see that much of the money due to tax.
That's for another thread!!

I know, I was disputing the idea that early retirees in the public sector are out saving the world.

Thus paying a lot more tax - no more tax relief on pension contributions. I seem to vaguely remember that the NHS restricts them to 16 hours a week.

I'm mid 40s so gen X/millennial depending on your definition. I think part of the problem comes from the fact that women my age and younger have got used to the idea that we don't know when we'll be able to retire.

The pension age keeps going up and up and I fully expect it to be even higher than 68 when I eventually retire. It's seen as fluid and depressing so I suppose the fact that it was moved from what is seen as a very young age (60) doesn't inspire much sympathy. It also comes from the fact that we're used to having the internet for instant info- if you want to know your pension age it takes seconds to find out.

I was a teen in the 90s and remember my parents talking a lot about the pension age and NI contributions. I am from a working class family but my dad in particular was very switched on and always reading/watching the news.

Everyone feels that 60 is too young and 68 will be fine until suddenly they reach menopause and start getting treated like a silly old lady by their colleagues, even if they're the boss. Then another 8 years of being sidelined and patronised loses its appeal.

@ismu I'm 64 and the boss. I have never been treated like an old lady (silly or otherwise), patronised or sidelined. I was promoted at 57 and again at 61. Actually that's not quite true, I was once, by an F2 in A&E when I had been involved in an accident.

I had quite a difficult and fairly early menopause and was done at 49. My DC were about 14 and 11 and DH was working abroad for much of 18 months/two years. HRT did the trick.

What I will say is that I have to pace far more than 10 years ago and I am quite a high energy person. I cannot throw a 55 hour week anymore and fit in the opera/theatre/dinner mid week or have a full on weekend without a day of annual leave on either side where possible.

I'm completely baffled by the posters who think that older generations who have retired are just slackers. They are out doing all the things councils used to be able to afford- planting town flower beds, driving voluntary ambulances, running meals on wheels / shopping services, organising food banks, home start, any charity or community group

I just googled this and it says 32% of people age 65 to 74 volunteer at least once a year. Which is actually slightly lower than the 35 to 44 age group (33%). I suspect there's a small cohort of retirees who are doing a huge amount but it's not the majority.

I don't want this to sound retiree bashing, I certainly don't expect people to give up their retirement to drive an ambulance, but let's just get the facts straight.

There is absolutely not the bloody money for this, and I struggled to feel sympathy for anyone whose chooses early retirement.

@RosesAndHellebores I suspect you work in a very different field from most of us !!!
Look around at the numbers of women who are suddenly sidelined in their late 50s/ early 60s. They just seem to quietly disappear

@khaitai 32% volunteer officially. I'd guess that there's a lot more unofficial volunteering. But I'd also imagine that at least 50% are involved in unpaid caring for children or elderly relatives.

I wasn’t because I worked as a contractor and my CV spoke for itself. My last contract was at 66 and I won it against three younger competitors. Decades of experience and a reputation for hitting the ground running won out.

Meanwhile younger generations will never be able to retire and probably won't get any state pension. I think that's why it hard for them to feel sympathy for the waspi situation. Add in yrs of being told they're lazy and useless (someone mentioned all the millenial bashing articles of the 2010s, this is very true and I remember these).

@Blossomtoes I thought you said you couldn't work beyond 60 because you were a contractor and the contracts ended?

I was just thinking that. I currently have two regular volunteer roles (weekly and monthly respectively) and most people I work with are in the 30-50 age group. The oldest is probably about 60, the youngest is 18. My previous volunteer roles have been the same. I’m not disputing that lots of older people volunteer of course, but it hasn’t been my experience.

Unless hampered by illness, life is what you make it. I plan to retire in about 9 months. I have quietly told a few people. I'm already being tapped up for consultancy.

If we weren't planning on spending at least three months abroad every year, I'd certainly stand as a local Councillor - I might anyway, just to shake it up a bit in my county.

Hey ho, meanwhile I just need to fund some ways of spending DH's pension pot.

Oh and as a late boomer I didn’t go to university, well I did but dropped out.to do a secretarial course and learn to cook! 😀

@owlpineapple lots of jobs allow paid hours for volunteers now.
Every community group and committee I can think of is populated by retirees, but that's probably because I live in the countryside which is full of old people.

I think this is very perceptive. It's difficult for younger women to imagine a time when the retirement age seemed to be set in stone, the government could be trusted not to move the goal posts, and information wasn't readily available. Rightly or wrongly, people were proud of the welfare state, and the idea that they should check their retirement age, just in case, would never have crossed their minds. If it had, it would have seemed utterly ludicrous.

There may be valid arguments for not paying compensation to everyone, but 'they should have known' is not one of them.

It was obvious from the early 90s women's retirement age would increase to match mens though.

That happens to men and women in all age groups. It happened to me because I had an NHS pension. Some private pension schemes involve being "contracted out".

In answer to a point made by someone else that women get lower pensions because they were less able to work, for some time now claiming Child benefit (was family allowance) has protected pensions contributions.

Unless hampered by illness, life is what you make it.

Sadly I feel this is no longer the case. For younger generations, financial, job and housing stability is becoming more and more dependent on luck, opportunity, family money and cohabitation. Hard work alone is increasingly not enough, and as time goes on the gulf between the haves and the have-nots is projected to get wider and wider.

I stand corrected by point 1. I didn't realise that there had been an earnings related component.

@Anonymouseposter there was but people could contract out of it and have the money put into a private pension. This may now impact the number of qualifying years people have on retirement and reduce their pension entitlement.

Whilst I think I have 45 years of NI, I was contracted out for a few years whilst working and from 2003 to 2016 in the LGPS. I will have just about made this up by the time I retire but would have had no chance to do so had the retirement age for women stayed at 60. It used to be compulsory up until about 2010 too.

@owlpineapple my grandparents, born in 2009 and 2011 remembered the workhouses. My great grandparents did more significantly (nobody in my family went there). They also remember a time when there was no NHS, no pensions, no benefits. I think people born in the 70s/80s/90s have forgotten just how hard life was for previous generations.

I think it's people born after that, 90s onwards, who seem to have no idea. Younger people seem so far to the right, politically, compared to my generation. Those of us born in the 70s and 80s had enough family awareness of what things were like ore welfare state and pre NHS to value them above anything.

1909 and 1911 !