How many years are you going to get?
Denis Cole started work at an abattoir straight after school. He was laid off just short of his 50th birthday because he couldn’t manage the job anymore. Thirty years as a slaughterman left bulging discs in three regions of his spine and constant pain, sometimes debilitating.
Linda Lehman worked as a residential care assistant; lifting, showering, dressing and helping clients in their homes. At 52 she stopped working. Her left shoulder was so badly worn that she couldn’t lift her arm and had trouble holding anything in her left hand.
Theirs are similar to stories told thousands of times over, every year, in court rooms, doctors’ surgeries and Centrelink offices across the country; stories of sore and broken bodies that have reached the end of their working lives.
Some will squeeze a bit of “compo” out of their boss’s WorkCover insurance. If they’re lucky it’ll be enough to get by for a few years. Many will rely on the disability support pension – $375 a week.
The government’s numbers show that nearly half of all people currently receiving the DSP are aged over 55. When Tony Abbott and social services minister Kevin Andrews are spitting their line about “spiralling” numbers claiming the DSP they don’t mention that most of the (actually quite modest) growth is attributable to people in this age bracket.
It’s never been harder to qualify for the DSP. Plenty of older workers who are put out of work can’t get it. Their bodies are tired but not broken, or broken but not badly enough – they have “capacity”, a doctor will say.
“Who’s going to give them a job?” asks Theo Nomicos. Theo is on the steering committee of the Victorian based Fair Go For Pensioners coalition (FGFP). “There are a lot of people on the dole because nobody takes them due to their age”, he told Red Flag.
Recently released figures show that the number of people aged over 50 on Newstart jumped by more than 40 percent between 2010 and 2013. Close to 200,000 now receiving the pittance – at most $255 a week – are aged in their 50s and 60s.
Pushing up the pension age will see this number rise much higher. The government and its business advisers well know this. They’re banking on the savings.
Of course, as the age pension is yanked further from reach, some people will stay at work. They’ll give the bosses more of their lives than they had planned; more than they want to. But for many, working life ends at a time not of their choosing.
Shifting the pension age merely relieves the ruling class of much of the cost of keeping these people alive. Greater numbers of damaged workers will live out their lives in poverty. More will be reliant on family assistance.
“How many years are you going to get to enjoy after whatever you did for this place?” asks Theo. “None”, is his answer.
Lew Wheeler, also from FGFP, argues that the attacks outlined in the budget are of major significance. “This is the beginning of transforming the way we understand our identity as a society”, she says.
Lew points out that the fight against an attack on the pension belongs to everyone. “These changes are not going to affect us”, she says. “We’ll be well dead but we’re fighting for the next generation of pensioners.”
Fair Go For Pensioners has called on pensioners, single parents and the unemployed to rally against the budget on Wednesday 21 May, 11am at the State Library of Victoria. Their demand is simple: “Justice for the poor”.
