Letter to the Editor

February 25, 2010

Mr. Ronan O’Beirne
News Editor
The Campus

Concerning your article “Sharing the Pain”(The Campus, Feb.10 ,2010, please note the following:

(i)Even if the retirees had been formally invited to participate in the pension hearings last winter, in the period following the hearings, the Union never informed the retirees that it was about to bargain away their pension indexation without their consent. The commonly held principle that you should always consult those who are most affected by a given decision was simply thrown away by the negotiators for the APBU.

(ii)The long run effect of the suspension of pension indexation for the retirees is much greater than the comparatively short run financial pain borne by those who are still full-time employees. The retirees, whose average pension is about $30,000, will see their buying power disappear quickly over the next several years. More importantly, this decrease will stay with them for the rest of their lives; it can never be regained. The full time employees, on the other hand, will see their increased pension contributions offset by a salary increase of 10% over three years and this increase is built in to their salaries for the remainder of their careers.

(iii)While both sides (the APBU and the Corporation) invoke various legal reasons for not granting representation to the retirees in this issue, common decency and respect for the pensioners would have dictated that they could have at least listened to our proposal to reduce the level of indexation after the Retirees Association was formed and before the pension amendment was signed. But the hard fact is that there was no discussion of alternatives, none at all. And, as it stands now, no avenue of appeal.

In short, a secret deal, an unfair deal and a deal made in a very unkind way.

Yours truly,

Dr. C. Rose
ABUR