Drum: ENTERPRISE
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men to have interrupted working lives – raising
children and looking after elderly relatives – many
find themselves penalised in later years.
why shouldn’t you work longer? More years in the
workplace seems a fair trade off for more years of
leisure, doesn’t it?
Having identified the problem, the Government is
now faced with the unenviable task of finding a
solution. They will be well aware that the pensions
‘black hole’ could end
It is here that the ‘longer life expectancy’ argument
starts to fall apart, because the oft-quoted increase
in life expectancy is only an average. The difference
in life expectancy between the rich and the poor –
those whose low-income jobs have prevented them
from saving enough to retire on in the first place –
rose from 5.5 years in the 1970s to 9.5 years in the
1990s. So, the poorest are expected to work for
longer in order to fix a mess decades in the making,
finally being allowed to retire on the same minimal
benefits they would have been entitled to anyway,
and afforded only a few year’s rest before a death
up becoming a
truly bottomless pit,
sucking into it the futures
of many thousands of men and
women approaching pensionable
age, not to mention their own hopes of
re-election. The Turner report identified three
alternatives for the people of Great Britain: pay
more tax, pay more into private pensions, or
retire later.
A ‘solution’ this may be, but it is one that inevitably
leads us back to the promise – the ‘moral contract’ –
between the Government and employees. Why,
many people are asking, should the goalposts
suddenly be moved? Why should we be expected to
keep on giving everything, to work until we drop?
This is not what we were promised.But, the
Government may argue, if you are living longer,
that may well be accelerated by those extra years
at work. The Pensions Minister himself last year
pointed out that raising the pensionable age to 70
would mean that most working-class men in his
constituency would only enjoy a year or two in
retirement, so relatively low is their life expectancy. »