‘Times are hard… but they will be even harder if this government gets its way,” warned UNISON’s Wendy Nicholls at the Labour party conference in Manchester today.
Ms Nicholls was speaking of the government’s plans to link pension age to state retirement age, which would lift retirement age for many public service workers into the late 60s.
She noted that although the government argues that people are living longer, not everyone is. In particular, those with stressful manual jobs who died younger risked being “robbed of their retirement” by the Tory plans.
She called on Labour to think about its policies on pensions and spoke out in support of the TUC’s policy that calls for employer pension contributions to reach 10% now, as opposed to the current “derisory” position that aims for employer contributions to reach 3% by 2017.