Liverpool Public Sector Workers Strike November 30th 2011

I was proud to march with 12000 people angry and concerned about unfair changes to their pensions. I am in a private stake holder pension these days - and my bosses don't contribute towards it, but I still have sympathy with the public sector. I have been in 8 pension schemes since I started work, a balance between company schemes, personal schemes and public schemes, and 4 stakeholder schemes (3 where the employer did contribute). Many of them will not deliver what I was promised when I took them up. 

I was told I would retire at 60, now it is 67. How old will I be before I actually do retire, will the goal posts be moved again? Will I even be alive to receive a pension by the time they let me go?

They do say that we are all living longer, but you tell that to the people of Everton who die at 68 years old on average, and Kensington isn't much better.

My residents may as well forget the very idea of a pension! Worked into the grave thanks to an uncaring Government.

And there is the young woman aged 25 I heard on the radio, a teacher, still living at home with Mum and Dad told to pay an extra £100 per month into her pension - and retire later - just to stand still with where she would have been a few years back - and that is from a frozen salary with a miserly 1% increase in future years. She said she wont be able to move out for ages now that her income is so reduced.

A picture tells a thousand words - and here are mine.

PS Councillor Richard Kemp, LibDem Deputy Leader in Liverpool tweeted on Wednesday  ‘Lots of Liverpool Council staff working today. Well done all’. And later, that the shops were full of shoppers as a result of the strike, and that ‘Every cloud has a silver lining.’ So we know where he stands!