Are we really better off?

It just means unfairness is piled upon unfairness

In the immortal words of Alan Jay Lerner (as sung by the debonair Maurice Chevalier in the musical Gigi), I’m glad I’m not young any more.

In spite of being one of those much-reviled baby-boomers who have allegedly benefited from everything from free education to rocketing property values and then cavalierly mucked it all up for the current generation, I actually have a lot of sympathy for the yoof of today – and not just because I am looking down on them from the great height of the superior altitude of old(ish) age and pulling up the drawbridge while simultaneously thumbing my nose.

Each generation, let’s face it, had and has its crosses to bear.

While it may be currently circulating in the news of today, fake or otherwise, that pensioners are now officially better off than those in work, I suspect (although I am not complaining at all about my lot), that, as in every other walk of present day life, the few at the very top are skewing things in a particularly unbalanced way for most of the rest of us.

Unbalanced

This may be backed up by the other currently circulating story that 1% of Scots “have more” than the bottom 50%.

The pension situation often remains awkward for females of the species, too, and in particular those who have been caught in the gender pay gap affecting many women born within months of each other in the mid-1950s who were relying on a state pension and have now had the feet taken from under them by being born just at the wrong time.

Ironically, in the face of the generational blame game so prevalent in current political debate, their cause is being championed by the youngest (and female) MP in the House of Commons, the SNP’s Mhairi Black.

Now, old feminist boot that I am, I quite accept that retirement age levels were, at one point, deeply unfair and needed to be brought into line.

Unfortunately, the cries of some of the “slighted” and “disadvantaged” men bleating that women were getting a benefit at an earlier age than they were pales into insignificance when you consider that, as I would point out in suitably jaundiced fashion, there has been an Equal Pay Act on the statute books of this country since 1970.

Pay gap

And yet it is still reckoned a pay gap exists between men and women that amounts to anything between 9% and 19% – and up to 35% in the higher echelons – and will, at the current rate of progress, take 60 years to close. Not going to hang by the neck waiting for that, then.

If said women had, in fact, had the benefit of the same salary for the same work – or even the opportunities to get some of the better and more highly paid jobs where the lack of female representation is still startlingly obvious – I could see the force of the introduction of retirement age changes aimed at ultimate equality.

As it is, it just means unfairness is piled upon unfairness, yet again. And let’s face it, even we so-called boomers of around 60 or so won’t actually be getting our state pensions, if such things are still on offer, till we are 66, 67 or 68. And counting.

So if we are better off than our working colleagues, it certainly isn’t because we’re all sucking the state dry in terms of public pension provision.

Robbing wee Peter to pay auld Paul isn’t quite as straightforward as some would have us believe.

Of course, there are areas that should be looked at. For example, if changes are made, in Scotland, to the free travel enjoyed by eligible seniors, I for one will be quite happy to forego it or to pay something towards it.

On a point of principle rather than because I or like-minded friends of a certain age are rolling in excess dough, like a batch of bad Bake-Off baps. Although no one will benefit much if it costs governments more to administer complex means testing than is gained by the process of sorting out the rich wheat from the poor chaff.

Hanging on?

In the past, of course, it was fashionable to complain about old people doing the industrial equivalent of bed blocking in the employment market, hanging on so long and with such determination that there was no work freed up for the younger generation.

Now, in wonderfully contradictory fashion, although we are all being told we have to work until we drop, more and more companies are keener and keener on getting rid of the over-50s, mostly via redundancies which mean that – guess what – these posts do not have to be filled by the young or anyone else.

Retirement, in certain political circles, is apparently now being designated as “unproductive time”. Only instead of it coming at the end of your life, young folks seem to be having this at the start instead.

And being encouraged to blame the older generation for it rather than the “divide and rule” attitude being peddled from on high.

Picture: PA. Are pensioners officially better off than those in work these days? Helen’s not so sure.