By Dougal MacDonald, CUPE 3911
The Harper government and its corporate allies have launched a big assault on pension rights.
They have dreamed up one private savings plan after another to either replace government and company defined-benefit indexed pensions or to block their improvement and extension to all Canadians. A defined-benefit indexed pension plan provides a retirement pension whose amount is set in advance (for example, 2% of the member's salary multiplied by the number of years of service), and that is indexed to (increases with) the Consumer Price Index. Such a pension gives the security of a regular and adequate monthly income for the rest of the retiree’s life. At present, 63 per cent of Canadians do NOT have company pension plans and will only have the Canada Pension Plan and their personal savings to rely on in retirement.
Arguments for private savings plans as superior to defined-benefit indexed pensions are empty rhetoric. Their aim is to tie Canadians to the private financial institutions, increase the profits of the corporations, and smash the public right of everyone to guaranteed security in retirement. False claims are being made that workers are better off with a private savings plan than with defined-benefit indexed pensions. The real reason for this claim is that corporations do not want revenue going into a defined-benefit indexed pension plan because that reduces the revenue going to the corporate owners. It should be kept in mind that all revenue can only come from what workers' produce, so the workers have every right to claim their share of it, including as pension benefits.
The corporations also dislike government pensions. The revenue going towards government guaranteed defined-benefit indexed pensions such as the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) or those held by public employees ends up with the workers, which once again means less revenue going to the owners, e.g., in subsidies or “tax breaks”. The current attempts to privatize pensions, to stop indexing existing pensions, and to deny pensions for new hires, as, for example, is being attempted at U.S. Steel in Hamilton, are a prelude to the next field of battle. That will be an attempt to dismantle the defined-benefit indexed pensions of public employees at all levels and to eventually eliminate not only the CPP but any notion of pensions at all.
When companies and governments block revenue going towards the retired generation and deny the public right of security in retirement for all, the owners are not only attacking seniors, they are blocking the younger and older generations from expressing their social solidarity with each other. This solidarity of younger and older is needed for modern society and its members to live and function in harmony. The campaign to deny pension revenue to seniors is an attack on society itself, an attack on the notion that a society must guarantee the rights of all, including the right to security in requirement. Everyone should be guaranteed security in retirement.