BERNADINE O SULLIVAN,
Sir, - I welcome the assurances, as reported in your edition of July 10th, that increases under benchmarking will be passed on to pensioners. Have these assurances more validity than those of the former Minister, Michael Woods, and the Labour Court itself in relation to payments for the present productivity of teachers, which, they stated, would be dealt with under benchmarking but which were not?
No doubt the Association of Retired Public Service Employees, representing 14 groups, which demonstrated on the pensions issue outside the Dáil on May 9th, and which intends picketing the ICTU in the autumn, will also welcome these assurances. Their concerns, shared and raised by myself, at the 1 per cent non-core, non-pensionable, once-off payment in the re-negotiated PPF, and at the requirement under benchmarking for proven productivity/modernisation (thus enabling Governments to plead that pensioners would not be entitled to all increases,) and at the report of the Public Service Commission on Pensions (which recommended a break in traditional pension parity), have apparently been heard.
It is regrettable that such serious concerns should be described as scaremongering by Mr Peter McLoone. Is the ICTU now going to publicly state its regret at negotiating the unprecedented 1 per cent non-core payment, which was not added to workers' salaries or to existing pensions, and which therefore wiped millions off the Government's future pay and pensions bill at workers' expense? And will it give a commitment that all future increases will form part of salary and will be pensionable and passed on to existing pensioners?
Will it now unequivocally state that all payment for supervision and substitution in schools by teachers will be fully pensionable under the teachers' superannuation scheme and that all retired teachers who have already done this work during their teaching lives will benefit from this in their pensions on a pro-rata basis?.
Or is the ploy to pay the pensioners this time, and then, when the radical new way of paying public servants, namely benchmarking, has been established, attention can be focused on implementing the recommendations of the Commission on Pensions? Has this threat to full pension entitlements for retired public service workers only been postponed for the time being? Is the ICTU now going to publicly reject the Fitzpatrick Report to the Taoiseach, which recommends "that an increasing proportion of public service pay be non-core and non-pensionable"? Is the ICTU now going to disown the recommendations of the Public Service Commission on Pensions, of which the ICTU president of was a member, and which recommends the replacement of traditional pension parity with a system where there will be, according to the commission itself, "winners and losers"? - Yours, etc.,
BERNADINE O SULLIVAN, Fortfield Road, Dublin 6w.