by Peter Burton

Created on: April 29, 2008   Last Updated: April 30, 2008

Quality of Life in Old Age ?

At the time of going to press, 1,200 members of Amicus/Unite employed at Grangemouth oil refinery have just ended a 48 hours strike the first strike in a British oil refinery since 1935. The strike is over proposed changes to the Final Salary Pension scheme . It is the latest in a long line of protests across Europe against the end of schemes that linked pensions to wages.

This general struggle for pension rights is in some ways an extension of the wage struggle. It is a struggle for deferred wages. But it is also about relations between generations - how we view the sacrifices of the older generations - and it is about the struggle for quality free time after work has ended.

This struggle for free time takes many forms - the struggle for holiday entitlements, for educational breaks, but also for a decent economic support for life in old age.
The pension issue taps into something deep here. The ideal of expanded free time - which also includes the right to uncoerced free work - is one factor in why the pension issue mobilises so many people.

The sub-text to New Labours' arguments about necessary reforms in an age when more people are living much longer is -"work until you drop"- and most Europeans know it .

If we can defend people's right to decent pensions, it does not just mean defending their right to be passive. In fact we know that if people have a decently funded old age, they will be more active, helping their family, helping the community, or maybe getting another job, maybe a part-time one, without any loss of their pension entitlements.

The most obvious aspect of crisis in the public pension system in Britain today is that the pension is simply not enough. It is an insult. It is down to 15% of average earnings. It has declined from being over 20% around 1980, and it is due to go down to about 10%. It is indexed to prices, not earnings, and as earnings have gradually crept ahead of prices that leaves pensioners behind.

The average pension of single women is only 100 a week. It's a curious feature of discussion of the public pension system is that it is always done in terms of pounds per week. The state pension is described as being 85 per week, or 120 for a couple. Normally it is children's pocket money we think of in terms of pounds per week, and we describe adult incomes in round annual sums. What pensioners are being asked to live on is considerably less than 5000 a year, and many are on less than 4000.

The big distinction among

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