Noremac:
I am not as harsh as Rjan over this. To be fair, if someone gives you a contract and says this will be your contract for the duration of your employment, it is reasonable to expect this to be the case.
Except that is a complete and utter fiction. The bosses do not give out lifetime contracts with guaranteed pay rises, offer aristocratic differentials with new starters, and so on. Even if they did once, the bosses would just say circumstances have changed so the old contract must change also - either take it, or leave it and go. The law and the judges will be on their side.
It is precisely the purpose of the union to challenge what the bosses offer, to set the terms and and force them to be better and to stay better - so even if the bosses were offering inferior contracts to new starters, it remains the responsibility of the union to challenge that.
You may have made plans based on your income and to have the rug pulled isn’t great, although according the media reports, a pay-off of 18 months of the benefit was offered.
Again it’s a fiction. Even the very youngest workers may well have genuine plans for things like a family, a mortgage, and financial security which is dependent on earning the existing rate of pay (not the inferior rate), which are all exactly the things the union is allowing to be assaulted for those workers.
And that is not to say that the new starters must be new to the game - there will be redundant older workers looking for another job, and those redundancies may well be occurring elsewhere because the union is allowing the company to undercut the market by hiring new starters at a lower rate of pay.
Other plans, like the plan to live in a house of a certain size or to retire at a certain age, are plans that can be changed for older workers as easily as they can be changed for younger workers, and for longer-serving workers as easily as for new starters. You just have to downsize your home, or work longer, which is exactly what you expect the new starters to do.
And if you don’t think it’s acceptable, then it isn’t acceptable for any worker.
As I have said, how much union time and funds can be used to protect superior pay for a minority of workers carrying out the same job as those on less pay? The principle is fine, it is more the mechanism of using a union to fight the case, where those claiming are only a small proportion of the workforce.
The reality is that without the union, they wouldn’t be able to protect their aristocratic terms, or to have even won them in the first place.