Socialist Worker Socialist Worker  How your pension could be hit
When Unison was trying to build support for strikes, the
pensions calculator it published assumed future pay rises of 2
percent above RPI inflation—that would mean 5.5 percent. But the
unions’ and employers’ official examples of how workers would
fare under the new scheme all stop at 4 percent.  This graph
shows why. If someone keeps more or less the same wage
throughout their career then they might do better with a career
average. But as annual pay rises go up, a final salary scheme
becomes far better.  There is a pay freeze today, but decades of
such low pay rises would be historically unprecedented. Even if
the pay freeze goes on for a while, workers would still likely
be getting incremental rises—and few stay in the same job for
decades.  The vast majority of workers will be on a higher wage
at the end of their career than they were at the start of it.
That means a pension based on final salary will be much better
for them.  As the unions