Retired staff at Eir are threatening to unseat union-nominated trustees of the company’s superannuation fund as they campaign against a decade-old agreement with management they say broke the link between their pensions and pay for those working for the company.
The Association of Eircom Pensioners is to run candidates in elections to be held over the coming months for all seven worker trustees on the company’s two superannuation schemes.
At present, the group of unions, which includes Fórsa and the Communication Workers Union, nominate the seven trustees. The pensioners’ association was offered the guarantee of two nominated positions but opted instead for a referendum on reverting to the election by the scheme’s members of all of the positions, a proposal backed by 71 per cent of those who participated, about 6,000 of the scheme’s 14,000 members, 12,800 of whom are retirees.
A significant number of the scheme’s members, including a small number still in employment, originally started working for the Department of Posts and Telegraphs before transferring to what was Bord Telecom Eireann with, they say, guarantees from the Government under the terms of the Post and Telegraphs Services Act, 1983, the legislation that abolished the department and also established An Post.
RM Block
The group says the guarantees provided covered security of tenure, conditions of service and pensions with transferring workers assured whey would not be worse off than if they had retained their civil service status.
Pensions, as with the civil service were initially tied to staff pay with increases to workers followed as a matter of course by similar percentage rises for pensioners but with both the company and pension scheme in financial difficulty a pensions accord was negotiated in 2010 that initially froze pensions then capped any increases.
The group says that since 2015 current staff have received total pay increases of 24.6 per cent while they have received 11.4 per cent and the pensioners’ association says its members, some of whom paid Class D social protection contributions throughout their career and so have no entitlement to a State pension, have seen their living standards decline by 29 per cent in recent years.
Many of the same concerns are raised by pensioners at An Post but Eir is said to be unique in that some of the staff continued to pay Class D contributions, normally reserved for some public sector workers, after the company was privatised.
In a letter to the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Communications in June concerning the situation at An Post, CWU general secretary Seán McDonagh said the union’s support for the pension accord had resulted in “significant pay and pension increases over the past five years”.
Retired members at both organisations have continued to be critical, however, and Frank Semple of the pensioners’ association described the rule change regarding the election of trustees of the Eir scheme as “a big win for pensioners”.
