The question of pensionability needs to be more fundamentally addressed

Aug 19, 2021 Letters

Dear Editor,

What a wonderful gesture (however short-lived the benefits) of a one-time cash grant to old age pensioners, presumably whether or not they are employed.
The question though is that the sustainability of the unemployed seemed to have been overlooked, and certainly given a choice the latter pensioners would opt for an extended monthly increase that would absorb statutory expenses less discomfortingly.
In the meantime however, the question of pensionability needs to be more fundamentally addressed, particularly with regard to public servants. After 55 years of independence they are still required to retire at the colonial eligible age of 55 years. One critical result has long since been that even if they have satisfied the full contributory requirements, public servants still have to await being 60 years of age before becoming eligible for the NIS dispensation.
Interestingly however, most, if not all, public corporate employers have instituted the retirement age as at least sixty years, with GPL for example inheriting a 65-year-old pensionability from the original Canadian owners of that facility.
Over the last decade or more there has been a significant incidence of peremptory terminations of public servants, consequent upon changes of administrations. Several of those affected would not have reached the eligibility requirement for pension.
In contrast (if not contradiction) the replacements who fill the vacancies created are, more often than not, recruited as ‘Contracted Employees’ by individual Ministries (at discretionary compensation values) with assurance of a gratuity of 22.5% of monthly salary payable every six months. Quite irrelevant of this process someone described the theory of relativity as ‘taking care of relatives and friends.’
But with that aside being forgiven, urgent attention needs to be paid to raising the pensionable age to no less than that obtaining in the rest of CARICOM, wherein Barbados has long been 62.5 years.

Yours truly,
E.B. John

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