According to the Guardian, the unions at the BBC (UNITE, Bectu and NUJ) have announced a strike ballot timed to allow action coinciding with the jubilee in response to the BBC going over the unions' heads with the announcement of a 1% pay offer - far below inflation.
There's a national "Keep Our Post Public" rally today against the government's plans to privatise Royal Mail, with Len McCluskey as one of the speakers.
Privatisation is a key plank of the government's strategy to increase profits at our expense, by opening up our public services as new markets for comercial activity.
Plank 2 is cutting real wages (in the public and private sector) by using mass unemployment to depress wages while letting inflation drift up. The latest inflation figures this week show CPI inflation up to 3.3%, while RPI inflation, which is a more realistic estimate of the rate of increase in the cost of living, is up to 4.7%. No wonder some members are being driven to take strike action to defend their standard of living - UNITE members at Heinz in Wigan start their strike over pay tonight.
Plank 3 is the assault on public services and the welfare state, by a combination of pushing costs onto individuals (as with education) and direct cuts in provision.
If we want to successfully defend our own jobs, standard of living and services, we need to support all those resisting any element of this strategy to make us pay for an economic crisis we did not create. Amongst other things, that means backing campaigns against privatisation such as at Royal Mail, campaigns to defend pay and pensions such as those at Heinz or the BBC, and campaigns against cuts in public service and the welfare state, such as the magnificent and inspiring campaign being waged by school, FE and University students.
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A useful report from the TUC on a PensionWatch survey showing the yawning gap between pensions for top company directors and those of ordinary employees.
They survey covered 329 directors from 102 top UK companies. Despite all the attacks company bosses have made on workers' pensions, most directors are still in Defined Benefit (DB) pension schemes, and most have a retirement age of 60. The average transfer value was £3.8m, providing an average annual pension of £227,726. The most common accrual rate was 1/30th, rather than the 1/60th or 1/80th enjoyed by most workers who still have DB schemes.
And those who don't have DB schemes aren't in the same boat as the rest of us either. The average annual company contribution to a Defined Contribution (DC) pension was £134,760!
However, I doubt very much they'll be rallying behind the members of UNITE, NUJ and BECTU who are currently fighting against outrageous attacks on their pension scheme at the BBC.
Congratulations to UNITE members and their colleagues in the NUJ and BECTU for an impressive result in the strike ballot over plans for savage cuts to their pension provision. It is reported in The Guardian and elsewhere that members of the three unions returned a majority of over 90% for strike action.
The BBC have already said they will be making revised proposals, and the media reports that the unions are not announcing strike dates until they have considered them.
The impressive strike vote represents the best chance to successfully defend pension provision.
There seems little doubt that BBC senior management were trying to impress the Con-Dem government with their "toughness". Instead they have impressed the workforce and the public with their greed and hypocrisy. The top 15 BBC managers paid themselves £4.76m and the deputy director general will get a pension of £400,000 a year.
Nobody should be fooled by the attempts to sow division between public and private sector workers. If pensions in the public sector are cut, it will make it harder still to defend and improve provision in the private sector.
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The onslaught on pensions in the IT & Comms sector continues, with the announcement that the BBC wants to slash pension provision. Their particular wheeze is to break the link to final salary by capping the increase in pay which can be pensionable - this is particularly nasty for younger members and in periods of high inflation.
It's good to see a strong union response, with the five BBC unions (UNITE, NUJ, BECTU, Equity and the Musicians Union) planning to coordinate strike ballots unless the proposals are withdrawn. The recent UNITE IT & Communications National Sector Committee meeting discussed the situation and agreed to send our members at the BBC a message of support.
The government is busy attacking pensions in both public and private sector. The Minister of State for Pensions, Steve Webb MP, announced the intention to change from using the Retail Price Index (RPI) to using the Consumer Price Index (CPI) as the measure of inflation for regulating occupational pensions.
This nasty announcement would affect millions of people - current pensioners, people who were previously in final salary pension schemes and those still contributing. Professional Pensions reports one consultancy estimating that 12 million people would have their pensions reduced.
A Pensions Age report quotes TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber:
"Over someone's whole retirement this will add up to a significant loss. CPI is less than RPI in most years because it excludes housing and council tax costs. But even if all other things are equal CPI is on average half a per cent less than RPI because it is calculated in a different way. If pensions in payment today had been linked to CPI instead of RPI for the last twenty years they would now be 14 per cent lower."
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