"Six myths about how the unions are ruining Britain"

"Don't believe everything you read about the trade unions – particularly if it's in the Daily Mail" Top article by Guardian columnist Ellie Mae O'Hagan.

I particularly like the myth "The unions do nothing for ordinary people" and her response "Actually this one's true. Except for paid holidays, the eight-hour day, paid sick leave, bringing an end to child labour, fighting for equal pay, better health and safety regulation, fighting workplace discrimination, the unions have done absolutely nothing".

Why Government policy on health & safety is "absolute drivel"

Check out this great post by TUC Hugh Robertson on "Government H&S policy built on myths"

"The Government have set out their policy on health and safety on the DWP website. It is clear, concise and simple and is also absolute drivel.

One of the four points it makes is “We believe that good health and safety is important, but the burden of excessive health and safety rules and regulations on business has become too great and a damaging compensation culture is stifling innovation and growth.” In a nutshell they are saying we have too much regulation and compensation and as a result business is suffering. They give no evidence for this and we are expected to just take it as fact..."

The Benefits System: EXPOSED

"The TUC tackles some of the media and political myths about the benefits system, with the aid of a talking dog".

Great Video. Hope everyone shares it with work colleagues and family. Need to expose the Tory myths about benefits.

Myths and Misconceptions about Welfare

A very good report in the indie about voters being "brain washed by Tory Welfare myths".

I would go further and say these are not myths but deliberate lies and distortions being put out by this Tory led Government to justify ideological attacks on the most vulnerable.

Not only on the chronically sick and the unemployed but mostly the working poor who depend upon the state to top up their employer poverty wages.

Actual benefit fraudsters should be dealt with harshly as they are thieves and criminals. However, so should the many City and business thieves who in practise steal far more from the public purse, yet rarely end up facing the justice at the Criminal Courts they deserve.

UPDATE: Check out Channel 4 FactCheck here on more Tory welfare porkies.

Tory housing claptrap and myth: young women become pregnant to get a Council flat

Yesterday morning I had the misfortune to listen to Andrew Pierce from talk radio show "LBC" pretending to be a journalist and  “interviewing” Tory Housing Minister Grant Shapps at their conference. Andrew had previously expressed his expert view that since he was brought up on a Council estate in Swindon he knew “for a fact” that girls would get deliberately pregnant to get a count flat.  How he actually knew this “fact” he kept to himself. 

He then spoke to Shapp and his first question was the Sun pub bore favourite about all these scroungers getting large amounts of housing benefit to live in London.  I thought for a moment he was going to ask about the 82,000 Londoners facing eviction from the recently announced cuts.  That moment obviously passed quickly.  Then a question on the usual prurient middle class hobby horse about young girls getting pregnant solely to get a Council flat and what-is-Shapp-going-to-do-about-it. 

My father died a Council tenant and my mother is still a housing association tenant.  Members of my family live and have lived in public housing up and down the country,  I have worked as a housing worker in Council and Housing Association estate offices for 18 years and I have never, ever known of anyone getting pregnant to get a council flat. 

Admittedly we do not ask as housing officer applicants this question (don’t give Sharpe ideas) but I have never seen or heard any evidence whatsoever.  It is an urban myth.  There will of course be an exception to the rule but the vast overwhelming majority of teenagers (repeat young vulnerable women) get pregnant for exactly the same reason that middle class kids get pregnant.   Inadequate and/or non existent sex education, drink, drugs, trying to keep a partner and sometime wanting a have a baby to love. Add to this mix poverty, inadequate health services and poor schooling and you do get high rates of teenage pregnancy on housing estates. 

But young women growing up on an estate are the first to know that getting a council flat does not mean (unfortunately) you have won first prize in life.  To think that someone would deliberately get themselves pregnant solely to bring up said child up by themselves in a bedsit on the 20^th floor of a tower block is just frankly deluded.

GMB mythbuster on the Local Government Pension Scheme

MYTHS EXPOSED Inaccurate information and misleading statements about the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) are rife in the media. This guide highlights the most prevalent and erroneous of these myths and sets out the realities of the LGPS. MYTH: Workers in the private sector have to pay for the LGPS while local government workers reap the benefits REALITY: Everyone pays for everyone else’s pension. Companies with occupational pension provision for their employees include pension costs when pricing their goods and services. All taxpayers pay for the cost of inadequate pension saving (increasingly prevalent in the private sector) through the tax and national insurance spent on increased take up of state benefits and demand on NHS and council care services. MYTH: 25% of council tax is spent on the LGPS REALITY: This misrepresentation deliberately ignores the fact that 75% of local authority income comes from sources other than council tax. The true figure as reflected by the Society of County Treasurers is around 5% (£65 a year for the average council taxpayer). MYTH: LGPS costs are soaring and the scheme is unsustainable REALITY: The cost of the LGPS to employers for service from April 2008 (2009 in Scotland and Northern Ireland) was reduced during the reforms to the scheme that included changed benefits and higher average member contributions. Member contributions on average increased by 0.5% and have continued to rise since, now approaching 0.7% above the old scheme’s member contribution rates. The introduction of cost sharing in the new scheme is designed to manage future funding volatility. Costs associated with service before the new scheme was introduced should have been funded by employers in the past. These costs cannot be reduced by changing the scheme for current or future members. MYTH: The employer contribution rate in the LGPS is too high REALITY: There is not one employer contribution rate in the LGPS. There are over 7,000 participating employers in the scheme and each has their contribution set by the private sector actuary employed by the relevant one of the 100 funds in Great Britain. Current employer contribution rates range from 14% to 25% with an average of 18%. Given the level of past underfunding that remains to be contributed by many employers to the scheme this is a reasonable level. At the 2010 valuation the level may change because the future service cost has dropped as a result of the 2008 reforms but the legacy of past underfunding by employers remains in many, although not all, funds. MYTH: Local government pensions are paid directly by the taxpayer REALITY: The LGPS, like all private sector defined benefit schemes, is a funded scheme with real investments in UK and overseas business and tangible assets such as property all generating returns to the 101 funds that make up the Local Government Pension Scheme in the UK. The taxpayer funds a proportion of the employer contribution to the funds through local and national taxation. MYTH: The LGPS is only nominally funded REALITY: The LGPS has more than £100bn in real assets: property, investments in UK and overseas businesses, cash and government bonds. Four out of the largest 20 pension funds in the UK measured by asset level are Local Government Pension Funds [Hewitt 2010]. Total income to the scheme exceeds expenditure by £4-5bn every year [CLG 2009], even in the current climate of poor economic performance. Even in the depths of the recession LGPS investments provided nearly £3 billion for the LGPS in England alone, accounting for 27% of that scheme's income. Another factor contributing to the ongoing viability of the scheme to this is the increase in member contributions. Yield from employees increased by 15% in the last year as a result of the new contribution rates in the 2008 Scheme [CLG 2009]. MYTH: Scheme members retire on gold-plated pensions, protected for life REALITY: Around half of LGPS pensions in payment are below £3,000 a year [Audit Commission 2010]. The mean average pension is £4,033 with the average for women only £2,600 [CLG 2009]. As with any pension scheme member’s accrued rights, it was generally held that pensions already paid for were protected for life, however, the unilateral cut in the indexation of pensions from RPI to CPI has brought this into question for both public and private sector pensions. As a result of the Tory-Lib Dem budget LGPS members are likely to lose a quarter of the value of their pensions over the next 25 years pushing many more on to means tested benefits. MYTH: High earners in the LGPS receive unreasonably high pensions REALITY: In local government highly paid employees are in the same pension scheme as the workers near the minimum wage. In the private sector many company directors and senior managers set up their own exclusive defined benefit schemes on extremely generous terms while their employees have only a low value defined contribution scheme. The average accrued pension for a director in the private sector is £227,726pa, 56 times higher than the average LGPS pension [TUC PensionsWatch 2010]. Some members of the LGPS retire on very high pensions as a result of receiving very high salaries (236 local government employees earn more than £142,500pa), not as a result of an over-generous pension scheme. MYTH: Local government workers have a job for life and better pay than everyone else REALITY: The average length of membership in the pension scheme is only six years in stark contrast to the vision of a job for life. Existing jobs are often part time and low paid with minimal opportunity for overtime and other mechanisms common in the private sector to boost income. When comparing full time workers who are saving for retirement through an occupational pension scheme, public sector workers actually earn £22 per week less than their private sector comparators. The 'total reward figure', which is gross pay and employers' pension contributions, in the private sector is £666 and in the public sector is £644 per week [ONS 2010]. Local government pay is also low in the public sector context with two thirds of local government workers earning less than £21,000 a year. MYTH: To make pensions fair public sector provision must be reduced to the level common in the private sector REALITY: This would increase the number of older people forced to live in poverty which in turn will increase the cost to the taxpayer of state benefits, health and care services. It is never the right solution to inequality to stoop to the level of the lowest common denominator. In education the solution to problem of good schools and bad schools is not to worsen the good schools so all children are poorly educated. In pensions the solution is not to worsen the good schemes but to raise the standard of the inadequate schemes. In fact defined benefit pension provision in the private sector attracts a future service employer contribution of 15.6% [DWP Pension Trends] compared with less than 14% in the LGPS. MYTH: LGPS benefits need to be cut or member contributions increased because of deficits in the funds REALITY: The LGPS is estimated to be at least 75% funded with sufficient assets to pay all pensions due for the next 20 years without any further contributions [Audit Commission 2010]. Where deficits exist they relate to past service and underfunding by employers. One reason for current deficits is that LGPS funds were between 1990 and 1993 encouraged by the then Conservative government to fund only to 75% so the pension scheme could fund lower poll tax bills. Now deficits are measured against a 100% funding requirement, the cost of this historic underfunding is clear. Changes to benefits would only affect the future service cost which, as set out above, is already below the private sector average for defined benefit provision. MYTH: The current economic situation means member contributions to the LGPS need to be increased REALITY: Benefits already earned by members have to be paid, whatever changes are made to the scheme. There are no short term cost savings to be made from making radical benefit cuts. Increases to member contribution rates would not aid the Treasury’s finances unless the government introduced a specific tax on LGPS members (which would be contrary to their stated commitment to encourage pension saving). Instead any increase would be transferred into LGPS funds which have already been valued, without going through a valuation revision an increase in member contributions is unlikely to have any impact on employer contributions for at least three years. Members are currently subject to a three year pay freeze, without the protection for the lowest earners that exists in other parts of the public sector. Some members of the LGPS earn only 37p an hour above the minimum wage and many lower earning potential LGPS members opt out of the scheme on grounds of affordability. This trend is particularly common among part time workers (the vast majority of whom are women), in Greater Manchester, one of the larger funds, only 10% of full time staff opt out of the LGPS compared with 30% of part time staff. MYTH: LGPS members retire at 60 and get a pension for nothing REALITY: The normal retirement age in the LGPS is 65 and has been for many years. Members of the scheme contribute between 5.5% and 7.5% of earnings depending on salary, averaging over 6.4% overall. This is more than double the amount the average member of a defined contribution scheme contributes. MYTH: The new LGPS only affects new starters while existing members have their own preferential scheme REALITY: Reforms to the LGPS affected all contributing scheme members, existing and new. The LGPS is not a two tier scheme, the LGPS 2008 is the scheme for any one of the two million people working in LGPS covered employment whether they started ten years ago, ten minutes ago or are due to start tomorrow. Existing members sacrificed benefits and increased their contributions in order to keep the scheme sustainable. The LGPS is the largest pension scheme in the country with more than 1.7m contributing members, 1m deferred members and a further 1m pensioner members.

Picture of former Labour West Ham Councillor, Mayor, MP and founder of the GMB, Will Thorne on a fact finding mission to Revolutionary Russia in 1917.  Hat tip Tom and original link to GMB site here.

The Myth of Punch & Judy Risk Assessment

The Health and Safety Executive myth of the month picks up on the nonsense put out by our ugly tabloid press about traditional “Punch and Judy” shows being required to have “risk assessments”. Yeah.

They report the actual truth of the matter “A Punch and Judy man received a standard letter from an event organiser asking him to submit a health and safety risk assessment. However when he questioned the need for it, they 'backed-off' and no paperwork was required. It sounds like wires got crossed somewhere and perhaps the standard letter was sent in error.

HSEs guidance is clear: if there is genuinely no significant risk, nothing needs to be written down.

If a written assessment is needed – keep it fit for purpose, and crucially: act on it. Paperwork without action does no one any good.”

These so called “newspapers” would also be the first to scream and shout if the HSE failed to enforce a regulation and someone then got hurt.

Myth of the month: if in doubt - just stick up a sign

The “Myth” of the month from the Heath and Safety Executive (HSE) is “Every possible risk needs a safety sign”. This is of course nonsense. This is what the HSE really say about it.

“The reality –Using too many signs just guarantees no one will read any of them.

Safety signs are useful when there’s a significant risk which can't be avoided or controlled in any other way. But that doesn't mean you should add a sign for every possible risk, however trivial.

Where there are serious risks in your workplace, don’t just rely on signs - take practical steps to deal with them. If you do need a sign, make sure it has the right symbol and is clearly visible”.

I think there is a genuine problem that in some organisations signs are inadequate, out of date or even non-existent! However, some employers seem to think that if they put up a “warning sign” this “covers” them and they don’t have to do anything else about the risk.

A good example is the workplace where the fire evacuation route has signs but they rarely test equipment, never practice fire drills or evacuations nor have suitable or adequate risk assessments.

Health and Safety “Ban” Christmas Decorations

Bah Humbug! Actually the Health & Safety Executive website “Myth of the Month” feature quite rightly lampoons the Daily Hate et al for pretending that companies are “banned” from putting up Crimbo decorations in office because of “Health & Safety”.

Some firms are too lazy or "Scrooge" like to pay for decorations and will just any old excuse to get out of it.

They point out that decorations are actually put up in HSE buildings without any fuss or bother. All they expect employers to do is sensible practical things such as provide a “suitable step ladder to put up decorations rather than expecting staff to balance on wheelie chairs”.

Makes sense to me.