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.

Indeed. If the state pension was actually a pension and calculated on the amount of NI you paid there would be a lot of very very small state pensions.

Exactly. The people who would have to pay for any "compensation" are the ones that will have to work until they're even older. I'm not sure how that's fair.

I do get that it's frustrating for people to have had to work a few more years before they can retire, but I find it hard to believe that they genuinely didn't know. The changes were first announced in the 1990s!

We absolutely need better financial support for people who have been forced to retire early due to health conditions/disabilities etc, but I think everyone else needs to suck it up. I mean, I'm not mad keen on the idea of having to work until I'm 67, but I won't be able to claim my state pension before that, and who knows, the age might even be changed again before I get there. We can't expect the younger generation to pay for everything.

@losingweightandgainingconfidence maybe you would feel more empathy with older women if you considered that, among other things
Women over 55 had no guarantee of maternity leave past 6 weeks
Women over 65 had little protection against employment discrimination and still had to be married to get contraception
Women over 75 were denied credit cards in their own name, suffered legal marital rape and illegal abortion
Women over 80 were born into a world of war, no NHS and rationing well into their teens.

These generations fought for equality and your future - and raised and taught and supported you.
Fortunately brain development is not complete until the age of 26-28 so there's some hope !!

How is it that an ombudsman recommendation can be ignored due to cost but train drivers get a large pay rise?

Because the train drivers are highly unionised and have the power to shut down the country. It's not misogyny, it's because they hold a lot of power.

Also the train driver payout is just over £100m. The WASPI one is £10b. That's 100x more.

That's not why state pension age is going up. It would go up anyway

The vast majority? 60% of over 65s who voted voted Leave.
A lower % of 57-65 yos, i.e today’s WASPIS at the date of voting.

And the demographics of voting was also very skewed on other counts. Areas of the country with the fewest university educated people voted Leave. And guess which generation of women was expected to leave work at 16 and work in a typing pool - or maybe train as the exalted role of ‘shorthand typist’ or ‘secretary’ if they showed promise?

And of course a significant % of the younger generation didn’t bother to vote at all.

If only they had! That might have been a better strategy for their future than now whining about boomers (if they are the ones that do).

In addition, the Leave campaign was heavily targeted at people who are amongst those most need the NHS. That (total lie of a) bus campaign stuck in people’s minds and I dare say frightened many older people.

<<squints out of window to see if SUV has magically appeared overnight>>

<< Goes back to scrutinising data from smart meter to decide whether to put the heating on>>

I'm in my 30s and this happened to me more than once (including being told at interview that they really wanted to hire a man for the role, but couldn't find one as well qualified, so I was the default appointment). The last time was more carefully verbalised so I couldn't prove anything, but was still utterly blatant as I'd just got married and I knew the senior partner's view on mat. leave. The same firm then rapidly promoted my new husband. This shit still goes on.

You’ve just proved the OP has a very valid point. Well done. 👏🏻👏🏻

@Ginmonkeyagain @Zigster there are a LOT of very small state pensions. They are DIRECTLY determined by what you have paid.

Everyone needs to check their contributions before retirement and try to top up their "stamp". Anyone who is on a private or occupational pension factors this in to retirement plans. It's easy now because it can be done on your phone. Before 2010 you'd need to ask your employer to do this for you.
As for SAHM many would only have NI contributions because it used to be lifted from child benefit and attributed to the woman's pension!!!!

I agree that a lot of women were treated very bad in the past - maternity leave was exactly that - you had to leave your job.
Discrimination was widespread - an employer I worked for fairly recently freely admitted in her later years that she would only employ men and "unmarriagable" (I wonder if she meant plain, spectacle wearing or lesbians under that definition it was the early 70's) women.
I did think it wasn't right that women could retire and collect their pensions at 60 while the men had to continue to work in heavy industries until 65 and would often drop dead within months of stopping work. The equalisation had to be done and it was done too quickly and without information.
The other thing is that married women could opt out of national insurance and rely on their husbands state pension

Yes the state pension is a contributions based benefit so your NI payments record matters in terms of how much you get. But it is not a pension, so it is the number of years you have paid NI that affects the size of the pension not the literal amount of NI you paid, otherwise high earners would get much larger ones.

...

@StrikeForever was 57 at the time of the referendum ...

50k on top of the state pension, would provide a decent income. I wish I had that kind of money! Trouble is, it would probably not be so much extra after losing pension credit and winter fuel allowance.

The things you mentioned here are indeed awful. But they're not relevant. They are not the fault of the younger people who you want to pay up even more and already have to work longer.
And the fighting for future generations bit is bollocks.they we're fighting for their own rights first. I mean fair enough, but let's not pretend it was all altruism.

Control and coercion were only made illegal in 2015.

Financial control in marriage was very common and not recognised as an issue for much of WASPI lifetimes.

Who knew you should save for old age? I remember watching the grasshopper and the ant disney film when I was little. "Oh, the world owes us a living!"

If I'm driving and get caught speeding, I can't say, "I didn't know it was a 40 zone." It's my responsibility to understand the rules of the road. Ignorance of the law has never been an excuse.

Although it does seem to be an excuse if you're a French rapist but we are talking about the UK.

@losingweightandgainingconfidence @ChristmasEveNotChristmasSteve the idea that mythical "Boomers" had it so good really pisses me off and I'm Gen X. When I was younger life was shit too. We had the joy of Black Friday and negative equity. Women generally got married before they were 21. Nuclear war was a real, constant threat. No one I knew had central heating or foreign holidays.
5% went to university. Class was a real barrier and anyone not white suffered open discrimination on mainstream media eg Saturday TV.
If old people want to buy shite for their gardens fair play, there have always been garden gnomes. If they want to drive a SUV you try getting into a smart car with arthritis.
Stop whining ageism and start building some solidarity with older people who have the time to make a difference, but less power.
You will be old one day if you're lucky. Maybe protest against rich companies and billionaires and work for a fairer future instead of blaming retired workers?

Not everyone on a low income gets Pension Credit at all. My partner doesn’t get a full state pension but doesn’t qualify for PC because I’m below retirement age. I’m severely disabled and I’m on a low part time income as a result.

We have no children so don’t qualify for UC either.

Just being old doesn’t magically make you rich, sadly.

I get that a lot of people won't have had opportunities to make private arrangements to cancel out the impact of the changes. But tbh, why should the waspi women be entitled to compensation when you're not?

The reality is, most people will have to work until they're older because of these changes, and I imagine that none of us are very thrilled about this, but it's just the way things are. We have an ageing population and someone has to pay for it.

Claiming that they didn't know about the changes soon enough and therefore couldn't plan to mitigate the impact suggests that they would have been in a position to put a load of extra money into a private pension in the first place. Those people do not need compensation in my view.

I just laughed to be honest. Pathetic.

I must book that cruise by driving b]my huge car (badly, because I'm soooo old) to the travel agent (because I'm too old and stupid and spend too much time counting my money to understand computers) and book our fourth cruise of the year, whilst paying my cleaner (cos we all have several) to clean my massive mortgage free home.
I mean, I'm over 60 so its all completely true about us

Well said. No idea what ridiculous generation marker letter I am, but you describe life in my 70s-90s childhood very well. My mother's generation went through hell. Boomer pensioners I know now are struggling in poverty, barely eating. Rich mumsnetters just don't get how hard ordinary people's lives were and are.