From: Joel Kosminsky
Sent: 18 November 2016
Subject: "TRANSPORT FOR LONDON (TFL) ATTACKS ITS OWN
PENSIONERS"
On my own responsibility, I am now pursuing this
through TSSA. I also wish to make NPC aware of what TfL is doing. Additionally,
through Ron's chairing of the SERTUC Pensioners Network, I would like this
raised at the next Network meeting. This email was sent today to TSSA following
the appalling outcome of the TfL Pensioners Forum meeting held on Thursday 17
November: As an elected delegate to the TfL Pensioners Consultative Council and
Pensioners Forum, I was yesterday subjected to the disgusting spectacle of TfL
unilaterally ending three key aspects for its 32,000 pensioners.
These were not pension entitlements but additional
facilities which TfL, and before that LRT/LT, pensioners have enjoyed. The
saving from these withdrawals is around £120,000 a year, which is 0.005% of the
£2.9 billion the organisation is seeking to cut from its expenditure. The three
things funded by TfL which have been unilaterally withdrawn (two were subjected
to a 'consultation' pressured by time and as expected, our responses were
ignored) are...
The annual calendar
to all pensioners, which also contains the contact details every pensioner needs,
on good quality paper which will last for a year (unilaterally withdrawn by the
Commissioner, no consultation). Annual cost around £25,000.
The 'replacement' contact list will be in an existing
quarterly pensioner magazine, which is on low-quality paper and has no
durability, even assuming pensioners see the information and remember to retain
it;
The small hamper,
which is an age-related qualification and only goes to oldest pensioners, and
the surviving partners of the eldest, the latter only every five years. Annual
cost £28,000;
and The Pensioner Liaison Representative (PLR) Scheme - this
is a voluntary arrangement whereby other TfL pensioners who are still active
and mobile maintain links with older TfL pensioners in a region close to the
activist's address. TfL's argument in this case is that less than 15% of
pensioners are reached. Even so, over 3000 isolated and often infirm pensioners
have a link via PLRs to former colleagues and people who understand their
needs. Replacements for PLRs are suggested (by management, who are all in the
workplace and do not have any understanding of specialised needs of older
people) as Age UK and "other services in the voluntary sector". Our
PLRs are free to TfL pensioners, but management do not care that Age UK for
example charges £16.50 an hour, just to make an assessment.
TfL's savings are
spread across the entire organisation but while each department and office make
sacrifices by consultation (...), pensioners who have no effective voice and
whose utility to TfL has ended, are now seen as only a liability, have been hit
for everything, to save a sum which will not make any appreciable difference to
the overall savings. The Pensioners Forum did as request, and consulted
colleagues. We offered cut-back alternatives for hampers, and ways to make the
PLR Scheme more cost-effective. Our submissions were flatly ignored. We had
already been presented with a non-negotiable fait accompli on the calendar,
which we believe is also sent to people other than pensioners, and we are being
asked to bear that cost too.
I am therefore asking
my union, of which I have been a full subscribing member since July 1986 (with
one intervening three-month free membership period in year 2000!) and an
activist for all this century, on the EC, my branches and Division, on the
Standing Orders Committee, and now in the Retired Members' Group, to take up
this blatant unfairness and bullying of a cadre of former employees who cannot
fight back in any directly meaningful way.
Pensioners are still people, many are still TSSA members.
Our pensions are deferred wages - we paid for them. Many pensioners gave loyal
service and many also served 'London Transport' in World War 2. This is not a
decent, human way to repay that.
My colleagues in RMT and ASLEF should be making similar
approaches to their unions. We (TSSA) supported Sadiq Khan to become Mayor of
London, and I'm asking you to directly ask him the following questions:
1. What exactly were
Sadiq's or his representatives' instructions to TfL in general and to Mike
Brown as to the making of savings?
2. Did the Mayor or his representatives ever use the term
'non-operational spend' or anything similar or which could be taken to mean
that, in terms of the savings sought from TfL?
3. Is the Mayor
content that pensioners are being forced to pay for these savings?
4. Does the Mayor
really believe that removing around £120,000 from the annual TfL budget will in
any meaningful way help reach the £2.9 billion saving?
If the Mayor demurs
from answering these questions, please advise me, and use your best endeavours
to seek responses via the London Labour Party and the Greater London Assembly.
Please ask these questions as a matter of urgency and send
the responses to me as soon as you can. This is a quality of life issue for
32,000 pensioners. Even the management who impose this will one day be
pensioners too - how will they feel when, even with their large pensions, one
day they have something of value taken away from them?
Please do not divert
this into the 'pending' file. 32,000 pensioners are now depending on people
like us to show that Society is not a figment of the late Thatcher's
imagination.
Regards Joel Kosminsky Vice-Chair Retired Members' Group
(but here in a personal capacity) Delegate TfL Pensioners Consultative Council
/ Pensioners Forum TfL (+ British Airways, + South West Trains) Pensioner.
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