AIBU to think that WASPI women should not be entitled to compensation?

[mugglewump]

They've been on the news again marching for compensation in a climate where the government is having to make very difficult decisions about funding to stop our debt ever increasing.

I think there are far more deserving cases for goverment money than women who didn't act on information at the time and sort their pensions out or keep working (p/t or f/t) until retirement age.

Moreover, the people paying this compensation are those who will be working until they are 67 to 70 to claim a state pension. Surely, it's a bit ick to expect them to bail out women who retired at 60?

I retired a year early because of illness, I thought I could hang on a year for my state pension. I had no idea that I would have to wait another 7 years to get it. Luckily my work pension kicked in at 60. We should have been informed a lot earlier and yes we should be given compensation.

It didn’t occur to you to check what you would be entitled to a year before you were planning to retire? Pension payments aren’t universal.

But if you were too ill to work from 59 what difference would more notice have made? You're surely not saying that you knew you were going to be so ill 10 years before?

@Cucumbersandwich75 Sorry for your illness. Sadly, this will be more common for Gen X and below who will be working until 68 - current SPA for those born after April ‘78. There was a thread about proposed age increase until 71. Many of us have occupational pensions tied to SPA. I think the consensus is that we will see a rise in sickness benefits paid.

Such a race to the bottom on here. "Well I won't be getting compensation/retiring/my generation/(add your own addition), so neither should you, wah wah, wah"

I'm not a WASPI but only just, and I am so glad to read this, as I've always found the whole thing confusing. Why did they expect to retire earlier than men? Why didn't they take note of the information that was everywhere? But you're not supposed to say it or you're seen as anti feminist!!

These WASPIs should buzz off!

Not only do I think they deserve compensation I think the retirement age for women should have stayed at 60 until the gender pay gap is eliminated.

If that is too far then any woman born before the sex discrimination act / equal pay acts were passed.

So, trying to get a handle on this...

What women are really complaining about is the speed of the increase. Women who were approaching 60 and looking forward to retirement were suddenly informed that they'd have to work another three years. Then, another five. I can understand how frustrating that must have been, if you were counting the days down to stopping work and then finding that you couldn't. Which will affect a tranche of women born over a few years.

Annoying and upsetting. You couldn't suddenly pay loads into a private pension to ensure that you got to retire when you thought you could, so you had to keep working.

Is that right? That this whole WASPI thing really only applies to that subsector of women who got little notice and couldn't afford to throw loads of money into a private pension?

I can sort of grasp those women wanting compensation, because it must be dreadful to be six months off retiring and then suddenly told that you're going to have to keep going for more years. Should they GET compensation? I simply don't think it can be afforded and, cross as they might be, it's just one of those things.

But the whole WASPI campaign seems to work around this. They're the ones who have made this a divisive and generational-based issue.

They aren't campaigning for the state pension age to be reduced back to 60/65 for all women/people. They're perfectly accepting of younger people having to work until whatever age it ends up as, except they believe that they alone were wronged for not being given a special exclusion to the new (inevitable) rules that affect everybody else.

It's very clearly not about somehow having been unaware of the changes, as it's been all across the various news media since the 1990s - and surely nobody is genuinely suggesting that women are too foolish to take any interest whatsoever in current affairs over decades nor any summary interest or concern about their own basic financial situation (unlike men, whose age was always 5 years older and has now also risen to the same extent as women's)?

It's clutching at straws for those people claiming that they had some kind of 'contract' with the government over entitlement to a state benefit - that the pension age for women used to be 60, so they just assumed that that alone (of all government policies over the decades) would remain that way forever.

It's beyond all comprehension that so many made such crucial life choices to hand in their notice without even checking now and then in their 40s, 50s and 60s.

Flip it around: how many of these women were out there campaigning bitterly against equal pay for women and insisting that, as women had been traditionally grossly underpaid in comparison to men for the same work, it was only fair that this should remain the case, with men keeping their sex-based traditional rights to be breadwinners for their families; and thus this situation must be protected in perpetuity and must never be allowed to change?

By the same logic I didn’t save anything for my retirement and don’t get to retire years before everyone else waaaaah.

Because WE'LL have to pay for it

We were told about the increase in state pension age for women, it all depended on when you were born. I remember some of us looking it up so we knew. I was in the age bracket who received the pension at 60, my next door neighbour was not. However we all knew many years before retirement.

It didn't bother me because, at that time, I always intended to work until 65 anyway and why not? We wanted equality with men and they had always had a 65 pension age. As it happened other things intervened and I gave up work before that but that's me, plenty my age and older were working well into their sixties and happy to do so.

My point is that we all knew about the age threshold increasing, it was well publicised.

I do not get why some are wanting compensation for this.

That is preciously why a lot of people think they stuck their heads in the sand and now want compo for that.

The majority of WASPI women knew through news and discussions, but are playing "gotcha" for some £s for the DWP for not sending a letter. A letter which likely would not have changed their lack of action/planning because it was something they already knew.

Women against state pension inequality is a perfectly reasonable name and one I agree with. Men have not suffered the loss that Waspi women have. The retirement age for women was sixty and for men sixty-five. Women who had expected to retire at sixty had this changed without anyone asking us how we felt about it - bearing in mind that women do the double shift, of outside work and domestic labour, it's reasonable that one of those should end while life is still enjoyable. Men, with a longer working life and the opportunity to build up much greater pension pots without having to take breaks for maternity or do the double shift (most men think they do a lot domestically when they certainly do not do 50% of the work along with a partner who is also working full time). A group of women in a particular age group were not told they were going to lose the pension rights they had worked their lives towards. That loss deserves compensation, it is indeed against state pension inequality: the inequality between what women were told they would get for their double shift and what they got - it has nothing to do with what men got/get which they only had to work the single shift for.
Seems all about actual equality to me.
NB It's a good name: referencing both what has happened and also the constraints on women in the sixties (waspi is a type of corset).

Yes lucky men to have to work a whole extra 5 years to draw down a pension @Grammarnut. By that rationale WASPI women should be thanking government for extending them the opportunity.

You’re making this all up though! Women weren’t promised anything for some so called “double shift”. It’s not the state’s fault if you do more cleaning or childcare in your home.
There was no deal that you retire earlier because of any of these reasons.
The ages were set originally at a time when women’s life expectancy was significantly lower. In the early 90s when this change was debated and consulted women’s life expectancy had surpassed men. It simply make no sense for women to retire 5 years earlier.
Equalising does not mean penalising.
Just like women getting paid the same for the same role isn’t penalising men.

Post like yours are actually the issue. The argument made by WASPI was supposed to be that some women didn’t get enough notice for the changes because seemingly they opted out of society, whereas you just think women are owed compensation for their pension age changing.
Pension ages have changed since for women and men, and have several proposed changes in the coming years. Do all those working people get compensation because the retirement age has changed since they started work?

@Grammarnut
so the government should never increase pension age because when asked the people affected are always going to say no?

And you think you should be compensated because you do more housework than your husband? Well there is one easy solution to this.....get him to do more. Not sure why taxpayer should compensate you because your husband doesnt like housework. And you get NI credits for maternity leave, so this does go against your pension.

And any 'constraints in the 60's' you refer to - surely this group of people still retired at 60 so arent actually affected?

It's hardly that. You conveniently leave out the fact that they are expecting younger people to pay for them and retire 8 years later than what the WASPIs think is reasonable for themselves or very likely receive no state pension at all. Despite this, they have made the entire campaign all about themselves only, no mention of how unfair it is to push pensionable age up to nearly 70 for those a few years younger. None. If they didn't know about the rules, they should have checked and taken some responsibility. The thing is, they did but want to rely on the DWP not having written to every single one of them to try to claim £££ from current tax payers. A reasonable person, and there are many of them, would have felt disappointed but accepted the changes and worked a bit longer, not tried to sponge off younger people in generally worse situations.

'Women who had expected to retire at sixty had this changed without anyone asking us how we felt about it'

Are you really so naive that you expect the government to question everyone individually about how they feel about every tax rise or change to employment law?! This is just life! They need to deal with it in the same way they expect other to do so.

it is indeed against state pension inequality: the inequality between what women were told they would get for their double shift and what they got - it has nothing to do with what men got/get which they only had to work the single shift for.

The acrobatics to peg this as state inequality but a lower retirement age for women not.

We want equality, but not that equality.

Women who had expected to retire at sixty had this changed without anyone asking us how we felt about it
The changes applied to ALL women, and then men when it increased again. Waspi women simply got more phasing than anyone else.

I could summarise your post by saying that women were punished for no longer dying in childbirth or of the effects of childbirth. However, I don't agree that women's life expectancy in the 50s was lower than men's. Women in general have outlived their husbands if they survived childbearing. Your reasoning is no better than the general assumption that women retired at 60 in order to retire roughly at the same time as their husband, the average age gap between husband and wife being 5 years.
And it is the governments fault that women do the double shift - it has been successive governments which have encouraged and forced women out to work as well as running a home through their economic and social policies.
This was not what feminism was about - it was about choice. Now we none of us have a choice.

I could summarise your post by saying that women were punished for no longer dying in childbirth or of the effects of childbirth.

Being treated as a capable adult and retiring at the same age as men is not punishment!

You sound outrageously entitled.

And it is the governments fault that women do the double shift
You had to work, big fucking deal. It’s not the fault of government economic policy that your DH did F all at home.

I can only assume that some of the posters on here have taken years off to have children and then never really gone back to work. And done no financial planning at all. Hence have tiny/none existent pension pots and now find themselves in the shit financially.

But its not the taxpayers role to sort this out. Working when you have kids is hard work, i know as i did it. I took responsibility for my financial future - but i dont want to pay for yours too.

This is becoming a stridently anti-feminist, indeed anti-woman, thread! The economy needs to be for the people, to sustain our society, not the other way round, which is what we have in a neo-liberal world; i.e. if you are not an economically productive unit you have no worth.
No, I don't need to be compensated for the double shift that all women do. I require that the state and society understand and accommodate women's biology and their role in bearing and rearing each generation. I want it to be possible to take out the years of childbearing and that those years be counted for seniority, pension etc for women (ditto men if they do this to rear children - they cannot have the bearing part, of course) and that it be possible to train for a career (or job, most people have jobs) at various stages of our lives. Such a world would accommodate women's role and not exploit the current and past fact that women are those most liable to be landed with caring for both ends of the age spectrum - both their children and their parents. This is a feminist stance.
As for the Waspi women, the Ombudsman agreed that they have been disadvantaged, so why is the governemtn able to argue that they have not and not pay the compensation that the Ombudsman thought appropriate?