I R CHANGES ATTACK PENSIONS

There has been from from the outset widespread community concern that the Federal Government's work choices would lead to lower wages in real terms, of course the Howard Government has denied this. However it seems logical to us that if the employer is the opportunity to allow him to pay lower wages he will weather it be through reduced overtime and RDO'S is will result in some control on the workers entitlements.  The Australian Government fair pay commissioner told a senate committee on 29th May 2006 that his office had analysed 250 out of 6,263 Australian workplace agreements [AWA] lodged in the first month of the new industrial relations system. Of this sample 40% stripped workers entitlement to public holidays, 52% reduced their shift loading payment, 63% cut penalty rates , 64% removed leave loading payments. Significantly 22% of the sampled agreements , allowed for no wage increases for the duration of the agreement. Apart from this impact, work choices will have an indirect but dramatic effect on the age pension. The age pension is indexed every 6 months based on [ CPI ] or increase in total male average weekly earnings [MTAWE] or whichever is higher. Under work choices the average wage is likely to fall, therefore Aged Pensions will only increase with CPI which may futher suppress the amount of any future increases , bearing in mind that the Aged Pension paid now is hardly enough to survive on considering what we should have been paid ,considering our 7.5% Superanuation Tax contribution we paid to the Federal Government, during our working lives. [ I refer to the article the Truth about Pensions] in our November 2005 edition. While pensions are likely to increase slightly in the short term, as inflation reduces so will wages and inturn CPI reduction will effect future increases in the Pension.   CPSA is also concerned that the Australian Government could interpert the change in the dominant basis to CPI for indexing the age pension as a prompt to change the this basis exclusively to MTAWE . Its justification could well be that traditionally, pensions are indexed to keep up with wages.What would be more reasonable than this should continue? Such change would deliver massive savings to the Australian Government, which pays approximately 3.5 million pensions. For example, reducing each fortnightly pension by $10 would save the Federal Government $1 billion per/year An additional concern about workchoices legislation are on working conditions on those parts of the community not covered by state awards.The pay of employees in this sector is already lower than the other sectors. Of particular concern is the impact of workchoices on working conditions in nursing homes, where in many cases the standard of care is very low already, this is at risk of deteriorating even futher if nursing homes are being paid less.

Edna Kay  CPSA State President